The debate raging in the 28 Days Later films has never really been about whether people will survive the zombie apocalypse. If anything, that has always felt incidental. The real question in director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland’s vision is: will our humanity survive with us?
The strongest case in our favour arrived with 28 Years Later. His name is Kelson, played by Ralph Fiennes like no one else could. “He’s a highly original creation by Alex,” Fiennes tells The National.
When we first get a glimpse of Fiennes’s character in the first film in this burgeoning trilogy, it’s hard to know what to make of him. We meet him through the eyes of a young teenager named Spike (Alfie Williams), who is searching for a doctor who might be able to help his sick mother.
Kelson is a doctor, though he rarely gets the chance to help others in a fallen world. And while he can’t save Spike’s mother, he can help him on a spiritual level – providing end-of-life care and helping the boy accept death as an inevitability.
Kelson tells the boy: “Memento mori: remember that you must die. Memento amoris: remember that you must love.”
Fiennes remains in awe of the character. “He has an extraordinary sense of vocation. The dead have accumulated around him, and he’s chosen to honour them,” he says.
“He’s a survivor. He survived through morphine tip darts, which we’ve seen in the first film. But out there, he’s maintained a humanistic, empathetic quality. He’s maintained an ethical balance.”
When we meet Kelson again in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which picks up directly from the last film, it is no longer through Spike’s eyes. Now we see the world through Kelson’s own, inside the temple he has built from human remains as an act of love and remembrance.
“I think he’s quite lonely out there, honestly,” Fiennes says. “To maintain his sense of self is an amazing feat of psychological stamina. He’s a little eccentric, perhaps, but he’s held on – alone with his records, his music, in his little cabin.”
That fragile equilibrium is shattered by the arrival of Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, played by Jack O’Connell – a self-styled leader whose authority is built not on care or survival, but on domination. As the head of the Jimmys, a cult modelled on the grotesque charisma of Jimmy Savile, Crystal represents a world where power is mistaken for reverence and cruelty is reframed as order.
Where Kelson tends to memory, Crystal manipulates it. Where one honours the dead, the other exploits the living. Their collision gives 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple its most unsettling tension – not because it pits good against evil in abstract terms, but because it asks which version of survival people will choose to follow when fear demands certainty.
“If he’s an angel of compassion and healing, he meets the opposite,” Fiennes says. “He meets an angel of destruction and violence.”
That confrontation forces Kelson into action. He can no longer let his life be defined by solitude or ritual. Now he must respond – improvising under pressure, using performance and theatre as tools to disarm a figure who thrives on spectacle and control.
In the film’s most striking scene, Fiennes portrays “Old Nick” – what Crystal calls Satan, and who, in his deranged worldview, he believes to be his literal father.
“Kelson has to improvise quickly with an idea,” Fiennes explains. “He has a piece of music to which he performs a version of Old Nick. I think he just does it. He has to create a strong impression on Jack O’Connell’s character.”
Yet while the thread of good and evil defines the film’s central conflict, its most unexpected emotional core lies with Samson, an infected “alpha” with whom Kelson forms a powerful bond.
For Fiennes, that relationship reveals the film’s deeper argument. Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal may have lost sight of his humanity, but if Samson’s remains buried within him, then survival still carries meaning.
“It’s all through minimal dialogue,” Fiennes says. “There are rough silences, through the sense of connection that comes from being close to one another. Ultimately, I think this film is a little poem to friendship.”
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is in cinemas now
