28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Trailer Hints at Creepier Role for Jack O’Connell’s Jimmy

This article contains spoilers for 28 Years Later.

Some folks were honestly befuddled when 28 Years Later ended this past summer. After watching a wistful and we would argue beatific meditation on death and the bitter pleasures in mortality, the last 90 or so seconds of the Danny Boyle and Alex Garland sequel to their zombie genre reinvention takes a WILD tonal shift. Out in the desolate countryside of a rage-virus-infected UK, young Spike (Alfie Williams) has bitten off more than he can chew by venturing into the wilderness. The lad finds himself cornered on a blocked path by ghouls who want to rip him limb from limb.

It is only then that he spots the bejeweled and swaggering Scotsman with a sense of showmanship: Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), the same guy we saw as a kid in the movie’s prologue—right before his parents and vicar got eviscerated by the first wave of zombies way back when. Nowadays Jimmy is thriving (notice that lordly title he’s given himself) when he tells an arrow-armed Spike, “Wonderful shot, there’s real poetry. Although I think there’s a few too many coming now, even for a fine young warrior like yourself. Would you mind if we stepped in? It would be our pleasure.”

All courtly pleasantries and compliments, Jimmy holds himself like a prima donna before ordering his jogging suit-uniformed underlings—all amusingly credited as “the Jimmys”—into battle. It. Is. JARRING. Like if a Corman McCarthy novel ended by veering into George Miller’s Mad Max universe with a NuMetal soundtrack suddenly blaring.

Some folks were taken aback, but frankly I enjoyed the utter chaos of the sequence. There was also obviously more at work than just a gag about “the apocalypse is nuts, right?” As many astutely British viewers picked up on, O’Connell’s Jimmy Crystal has seemed to model his adult persona partially on Jimmy Savile, a disgraced children’s entertainer on the BBC who secretly abused and preyed on hundreds of children (but whose predations did not come to light until after his death in 2011). That was the first indication of how dark things could be going as we learn more about O’Connell’s Jimmy, the man who tells Spike “let’s be pals.” The next is the new trailer for the immediate sequel, January’s fast-approaching 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

With a new director in Nia DaCosta behind the camera—but Garland staying on as screenwriter, and Boyle as producer—the tone appears to shift again as O’Connell’s Jimmy holds an authoritarian and insidiously oppressive hand over his fellow survivors. “Are you ready?” he ominously asks Spike in the trailer… but only after we’ve seen that the tortured dude Spike and his father found in the last movie was probably Jimmy’s victim as well. Elsewhere in the trailer, we and Spike see all the Jimmys holding court over individuals who are gagged and frightened before their captors. If O’Connell seemed menacing in this year’s most popular horror movie, Sinners, he will apparently become genuinely demonic in Bone Temple.

All of this seems to be of a piece with the larger themes Garland and Boyle have infused in their new trilogy set 28 years after the original film’s events. This past June’s film quite deliberately tapped into themes of British isolationism and regressive-thinking in a post-Brexit world. In Spike’s far more idyllic home on Holy Island, folks have returned to an agrarian and frankly medieval lifestyle. They live each day to sow the seed and harvest the crops; and every night they drink under a portrait of their queen (in this case the long gone Lizzy II).

Yet Jimmy and his minions might represent another side of this descent into backwards-thinking: those who consider themselves noble, entitled, or divinely chosen to live above the rest.

“I’d say, let’s see if we ever get to make three movies, because it would essentially address that,” Garland previously told me when I asked if we would ever see a 28 Days movie with kings, queens, and an aristocracy returning to this world. “If you take technology away, where do people look and what is it they choose to remember, and how do they configure themselves? So it’s kind of a background note rather than the whole scheme, but by the end of the second film, the scheme starts to get more stated.”

Whether Jimmy thinks he has the divine right to rule, the grandiloquent way he introduces himself to Spike, complimenting “the poetry” of his archery skill, as if he were a knight of King Richard’s who had just come upon Robin of the Hood, speaks to how Jimmy views himself. The fact he also keeps his father’s crucifix (if eerily turned upside down) likewise hints at how he twists religion to inform his self-image: a warrior knight leading his merry band into battle.

But there are the lies we tell ourselves and the cold reality of what is actually happening. Given the somber tone of The Bone Temple’s trailer, it seems likely that we’ll be faced with both elements when the movie opens on Jan. 16.