This article contains full spoilers for 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple.
Twenty-eight years later, the rage virus still ravages the United Kingdom. But 28 years and 110 minutes later, or whenever the events of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple finish, the tide begins to turn. Dr. Ian Kelson seems to have discovered a cure for the virus and administered it on his most dangerous patient, the hulking Alpha Infected he refers to as “Samson.” As Kelson succumbs to the wounds he received from the maniacal Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, Samson arrives to thank the doctor—which he does by speaking words, recovering the language the virus seemed to strip away.
Does that mean the story is finished? The zombie threat has been solved and the good guys will live happily ever after? Not so, says Bone Temple director Nia DaCosta. In a debrief with The Hollywood Reporter, DaCosta points out that Samson is “not fully cured, and the level that he is healed is permanent. He’s not what he was, but is he one of us? I don’t know. But he’s not what he was.”
DaCosta visualizes that difference throughout the film. Even before Keslon (Ralph Fiennes) muses that the Infected must see things differently than uninfected people, we see through the perspective of Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) in which other people become raging zombies from which he must defend himself. In one of the movie’s most poignant moments, Kelson’s treatments allow Samson to relive an experience on a commuter train, recalling the humanity that he once had. As Kelson puts it, the rage virus seems to cover over the person who was once there.
