28 Years Later's incendiary Jimmy Savile twist: All your questions, answered

Telegraph

23-06-2025

Contains spoilers for 28 Years Later
Now then, now then. When I attended a press screening for 28 Years Later the week before release, a note sent with the tickets asked us not to spoil the ending in our reviews. This is a common ploy by publicists seeking to build buzz and intrigue, and often the result is disappointing. (Think a Marvel character you've never heard of appearing for 15 seconds.)
However, when Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's excellent zombie epic ends with the introduction of Jack O'Connell's character Sir Jimmy Crystal and his band of murderous desperadoes, all of whom are dressed in colour-coded outfits that come over as a cross between the Power Rangers and the infamous Jimmy Savile, to the accompaniment of the Teletubbies ' 'One, two, three, four!' on the soundtrack, it is a jaw-droppingly provocative and incendiary ending. For once, it really did need to be left for audiences to discover it for themselves, rather than having it spoilt by critics.
The film makes great play of (specifically British) audiences' knowledge of the chilling spectacle of Savile, a DJ, presenter of the wish-fulfilment show Jim'll Fix It and, we now know, notorious rapist, paedophile and suspected necrophile. He has become rightly despised as one of the most evil men that Britain has ever seen since his death in 2011. Even during his lifetime, and fame, there was clearly something not right about him.
Savile would make black humoured jokes about how he had only evaded detection for his many crimes because of his charity work – jokes that no longer seem very funny – and took an almost perverse pride in how his closeness to the establishment allowed him to groom and assault his victims with impunity.
Overseas audiences will inevitably know less about him, and so should probably watch the comprehensive 2022 Netflix documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, which explores his crimes in sickening depth. Perhaps surprisingly, he has been largely kept out of fiction. A recent Steve Coogan drama, The Reckoning, explored his grim life and depraved antics, and it was also suggested in series three of Line of Duty that the character was somehow involved with the (fictitious) details of child sexual abuse as depicted in the show. However, film-makers know that accusations of opportunism and bad taste might be made if he was to be included in mainstream drama. These accusations have now indeed been levelled, in some quarters, against 28 Years Later and its makers.
To say that the ending has proved divisive, especially in the United States, would be an understatement. (Not that the twist has hurt the film's box office performance; half its $60 million opening weekend haul has come from the US.)
Yet Boyle and Garland have never been film-makers who have taken the easy option – think about the various outrageous and shocking scenes in their films, encompassing everything from Trainspotting and Ex Machina to their previous collaborations, Sunshine and 28 Days Later – and so this full-strength conclusion to the picture not only sets up next year's sequel, The Bone Temple, very intriguingly, but also leaves audiences with numerous questions which deserve answering.
Who are Sir Jimmy Crystal and his gang?
The introduction of the presumably villainous Sir Jimmy in the closing moments of 28 Years Later gives an already unsettling film a horrific jolt. As he and his companions – also all referred to as 'Jimmy' – set about murdering a group of 'infected', as the film terms its zombies, with extreme, gleeful prejudice, it's a grim and shocking moment that brings A Clockwork Orange – a clear Boyle touchstone throughout his career – to mind. Yet the most disturbing aspect of the scene is that Sir Jimmy, and the other Jimmys, are all attired in hideous-coloured tracksuits, lengthy blonde wigs and have their hands festooned with jewellery: a clear homage to Savile.
O'Connell – who, with his appearance as a sadistic Irish vampire in Ryan Coogler's Sinners, is surely becoming 2025's go-to villain for horror films – is too big a star to appear for as small a role as this. Audiences are promised that the Jimmys will return in a big way for The Bone Temple. When Sir Jimmy says to Alfie Williams's young protagonist Spike 'Let's be friends', the moment is chilling, not least because it seems quite clear that the Jimmys are not the kind of people anyone would want to be friends with.
Yet the film has already teased his introduction with enormous sophistication. It's the young Jimmy who we meet in the terrifying prologue, set, appropriately enough, 28 years before the rest of the film. The boy is the sole survivor of the Teletubbies-inflected infected massacre and the recipient of his fanatical clergyman father's crucifix, which he's seen holding when he's reintroduced.
There are lots of hints as to his reappearance, too, which many viewers may only pick up on with a second viewing. When Spike and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) head to the mainland for Spike's first kill of an infected, they find the body of a tortured figure hung up upside-down in an abandoned farmhouse, with the word 'Jimmy' carved onto it; the same word is scrawled all over the outside walls.
From these little clues, it's quite clear that the Jimmy gang is a bunch of murderous sadists who are intent on causing as much mayhem and torment as they can. How and why, and how they've managed to survive for so long amidst the infected, will (presumably) be explained in the second film.
Why are the Jimmys in thrall to Jimmy Savile?
Although the Jimmy characters are not named in the film, the end credits reveal that they all have a suitably grim collection of surnames. We can expect to meet Jimmy Fox, Jimmy Snake, Jimmy Jones, the unimaginatively named Jimmy Jimmy, the more imaginatively named Jimmy S___e and their female equivalent, Jimmina. No doubt all of them are going to play a greater role in the sequel, but the small clues that we are given about their dispositions in 28 Years Later are that they're violent, have hideous taste in clothes and are all followers of O'Connell's Sir Jimmy: a self-bestowed title, unlike the knighthood bestowed upon Savile.
It isn't made clear in this picture as to why they should all be fascinated by the ghoulish disc jockey and TV presenter, but Boyle and Garland have suggested in interviews that it all fits with the film's warped sense of England and Englishness. As Boyle told Business Insider: '[Savile is] as much to do with pop culture as he is to do with sportswear, to do with cricket, to do with the honours system. It's all kind of twisting in this partial remembrance, clinging onto things and then recreating them as an image for followers.' (Incidentally, Boyle himself was offered a knighthood after directing the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics, and turned it down, saying 'it was insensitive of them to ask me, to be honest.')
🎬 | Bts photo of Erin Kellyman with the Jimmy gang on the set of '28 Years Later'. pic.twitter.com/OrrMuaTPOM
— Erin Kellyman Updates (@updateskellyman) June 23, 2025
Yet there's another telling detail that has been picked up on by eagle-eyed viewers who have been swift to disseminate it on Reddit forums. The film's prologue takes place around the same time that the first film was released, in the early years of the millennium, when Savile may have been regarded with suspicion (see the 2000 Louis Theroux documentary When Louis Met Jimmy) but was still seen by many (at least publicly) as a noble figure who had given his life, and fortune, to charity.
Therefore, in this alternative world, Savile was never unmasked as a predator, but instead continued to be regarded as a hero by many, meaning that the 'Jimmys' are not following in the footsteps of a disgraced and evil man, but instead believe him to be a secular saint of sorts. That the audience knows differently is all part of the intrigue. As one commenter observed, 'I like the theory that they think Jim will fix it as per the TV show and save them from the infected.'
What is the point of the Savile allusion?
When the Jimmys appear, it's a deliberately shocking moment, both in terms of the violence and then the realisation that there might be worse things out there than the infected. This is something of a homage to the original 28 Days Later, when it becomes clear that Christopher Eccleston's demented army major and his men want to force female survivors of the infected into sexual slavery for their own perverse ends. Yet Boyle and Garland are both careful film-makers who would never include a detail as provocative as this simply to elicit a shocked reaction.
Instead, Garland has argued that the ending is of a piece with the rest of the film's themes. He suggested that Savile was a 'trippy, f----- up kaleidoscope', which chimes with the film's similarly phantasmagorical evocation of Englishness, visual throwbacks to Olivier's Henry V and Agincourt included. Yet it's also because the Jimmy character – who has obviously been traumatised from a young age by seeing his friends and family torn to pieces by infected – has created his own version of reality from a mixture of half-remembered pop culture allusions, just as Alex in A Clockwork Orange is inspired in his ultraviolence by everything from Beethoven to Singin' in the Rain.
'The thing about looking back is how selective memory is,' Garland has said. 'It cherry picks and it has amnesia, and crucially, it also misremembers. We are living in a time right now which is absolutely dominated by a misremembered past.'
Why is the ending so controversial?
In the United States, where Savile is barely known, if at all, the ending has caused significant confusion and even disappointment amongst audiences, who have been mystified as to who these shell-suit wearing, blonde wigged antagonists are supposed to be. As one cinemagoer sighed on X, 'I personally don't appreciate having to do some homework to appreciate a sequence that's otherwise random to end a film.'
It is also a (deliberately?) confusing aspect of the picture that the Aaron Taylor-Johnson character's name of 'Jamie' is close enough to 'Jimmy' for many viewers initially to believe that he is the grown-up version of the boy in the opening scene, safely escaped and now living in what seems to be comparative safety.
The other argument against the ending, and what it sets up for the next film, is simply that the appropriation of Savile as a pop-cultural feature is inappropriate and tasteless. Certainly, the film's anti-Brexit subtext, suggesting that Britain is an isolated, backwards island that has been cut off from Europe by force, is unlikely to endear it to those who continue to think Brexit was a good and necessary idea. (Boyle and Garland are clearly not Brexiteers.) Hinting that this isolation has led to the creation of Savile cultists is a provocative and deeply controversial way to conclude the film.
Finally, the jolt of black humour that comes moments after the deeply affecting conclusion of the storyline involving Spike's dying mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is an incongruous way to conclude the film that will be a true love-hate development. There will be those who believe that its kamikaze insanity ruins an otherwise thoughtful and serious film, and others who applaud its audacity.
What does all this mean for the sequel?
The choice of Candyman and the Marvels film-maker Nia DaCosta to direct the sequel, The Bone Temple – which has already been filmed and will be released in January – is an intriguing decision, given that DaCosta is a New York-raised American director who is tackling the follow-up to a film about Britain and Britishness.
However, the idea that DaCosta will bring an outsider's eye to a film that Boyle has already teased is about 'the nature of evil' can only be a good thing.
Just as Boyle brought his own inimitable perspective to the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (a film that, for understandable but regrettable reasons, he now claims he would not direct if he was offered the opportunity), so DaCosta has a chance to take the Savile-heavy mythology that The Bone Temple will inevitably be imbued with and make it not only comprehensible to American audiences but terrifying.
Savile may be a British phenomenon but the traits that he embodied – the manipulation of power and what evil can be unchecked if those in positions of authority look the other way – are truly universal ones, and this brief tease should be a curtain-raiser for something extraordinarily dark and provocative, coming our way in a few months.