The second film in the Alex Garland-penned 28 Years Later film trilogy, The Bone Temple, has debuted in cinemas this week.

And just like its 2025 predecessor, it’s littered with symbolism and metaphor.

The first of three new entries in the British zombie horror series was steeped in commentary on our post-Brexit/COVID world amid the rise of populism and what the screenwriter deems a backwards retreat into nostalgia.

Garland himself has also shared how 28 Years Later explores how we can misremember things in our British mythic retelling of the past.

At the end of the first film, young lad Spike ends up joining a Satanic cult called The Jimmies, who all dress up as the late abuser Jimmy Savile.

Led by Jack O’Connell’s chilling Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, complete with Jim’ll Fix It-style swimming pool lifeguard chair in the opening scene of The Bone Temple, this group is the focus of the second 28 Years Later film.

In the first movie, Spike’s relationship to masculinity is explored throughout a coming-of-age story. In the first half of the film, his father takes him out to get his first kill on the mainland, aged just 12 (three years younger than usual), where he has to face the brutal, bloody reality of infected England. Yet after being declared a man by the community upon his return, Spike discovers his dad is having an affair, and despite knowing there’s a doctor on the mainland, he hasn’t taken his sick wife, Isla, to see him. Spike thus concludes his father wants his mother (Jodie Comer) to die, so he can be with his mistress. As a result, the boy smuggles his mum back to the mainland to walk her to the doctor. If anything, this is Garland depicting the caring masculinity (without the bravado) that Spike ends up embodying bravely, even in the face of the selfish and abrasive Swedish soldier, who gets his comeuppance. Having reached Ralph Fiennes’ GP and taken on the responsibility of a foundling baby, Spike learns his mother has terminal cancer and comes to terms with death. Another loss of innocence. Yet he is now at a crossroads in his young manhood and doesn’t return to his father’s community, but spends 28 Days in the wilderness before encountering the Jimmy Savile cult.

In the Bone Temple, Spike is immediately dressed in the cult’s Jimmy Savile uniform, complete with a long blonde wig, before he’s forced into an initiation ceremony to kill another member. The young lad is now being mentored by the evil Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, who uses the language of “charity” to perform torturous acts of violence on unsuspecting survivors. This is Garland’s commentary on the real Sir Jimmy Savile, who was hailed in life as a much-loved hero for raising millions for charity. Yet in reality, he used his celebrity and comic persona to hide in plain sight as one of Britain’s most prolific sex offenders who preyed on all ages, often while engaged in charitable acts like volunteering as a hospital porter. In the alternate universe of 28 Years Later, the Rage virus outbreak brought on the zombie apocalypse in 2002. In this version of 2030, the survivors who remember Savile will know of him only in a positive light, as a national treasure who was knighted by the Queen in 1990 and was never found out for his evil crimes. This ties in with Garland’s theme of Britain’s misremembering the past and sugarcoating it mythically. So for Spike, this brutal and evil form of masculinity that characterises itself positively in front of him is another one to be overcome in his coming-of-age journey towards manhood. At the end of The Bone Temple, Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal is defeated; crucified upside down as the false Messiah he is, with the help of positive role model, Ralph Fiennes’ Dr Ian Kelson, who also kicks the bucket. But what’s all this got to do with Cillian Murphy’s Jim?

It is no coincidence that Garland wrote an evil cult all called Jimmy into a film franchise whose original lead, 28 Days Later, is Cillian Murphy’s Jim. Nor is it, when the latter returned in The Bone Temple’s final scene. After Jim and his daughter spot Spike and Jimmy Ink (aka Kelly) running away from the infected, she asks her father if they will help them, to which he replies, “Of course”. In a post-apocalyptic world, where other humans abandon each other when in danger (like the other group earlier in the film) and are often just as dangerous as the infected in a lawless society, Jim embodies the heroic, self-sacrificial decency he showed in 28 Days Later. In the 2002 original, Jim, Selena and Hannah found refuge at the army unit’s heavily fortified country house, after following a radio broadcast up North. However, it soon became apparent that this was to lure female survivors for the men to use as sex slaves. Escaping execution for resisting, Jim snuck his way back into the house, unleashing the infected on the soldiers and freeing the captive women.

Considering all this, 28 Years Later 3 will likely see Spike initially confused to come across another Jim, but one who embodies a good masculinity he can be mentored in. One that still does the right thing when the world turns upside down. Given the explicit commentary on history repeating itself and the rise of nationalism and populism in Jim’s exam revision session with his daughter, for Garland, this true masculinity presumably also means not succumbing to these returning voices in Western politics, but being more of a centrist Dad like Dr Kelson.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is out now in cinemas and 28 Years Later 3 starring Cillian Murphy’s Jim has been green-lit but its release date is TBC.