I

We are the hollow men 
We are the stuffed men 
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when 
We whisper together 
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass 
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour. 
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost 
Violent souls, but only 
As the hollow men 

                              II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams 
In death’s dream kingdom 
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are 
Sunlight on a broken column 
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are 
In the wind’s singing 
More distant and more solemn 
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer 
In death’s dream kingdom 
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves 
No nearer—

Not that final meeting 
In the twilight kingdom

                              III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are 
Trembling with tenderness 
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

                              IV

The eyes are not here 
There are no eyes here 
In this valley of dying stars 
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places 
We grope together 
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless 
The eyes reappear 
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose 
Of death’s twilight kingdom 
The hope only 
Of empty men.

                              V

Here we go round the prickly pear 
Prickly pear prickly pear 
Here we go round the prickly pear 
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea 
And the reality 
Between the motion 
And the act 
Falls the Shadow

                                  For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception 
And the creation
Between the emotion 
And the response 
Falls the Shadow

                                  Life is very long

Between the desire 
And the spasm 
Between the potency 
And the existence 
Between the essence 
And the descent 
Falls the Shadow

                                  For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is 
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot’s poetry was introduced to me in the fatigued, morally splintered world of Francis Ford Coppola’s film, Apocalypse Now. An infinitely memorable and at times quotable adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, Coppola’s film elevated not only my appreciation for cinema as an art form but also a better understanding of poetry’s influence.

Famously, Eliot’s poetry is regarded for its impenetrable hide. Its scale and scope have inspired endless critique and study, amounting to debate and disagreement. Despite this difficulty, Eliot’s 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', 'The Waste Land', and 'The Hollow Men' amount to epic proportions and sincere depths. In Coppola’s film, Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men helps to characterise the cluster of ideas, emotions, and events, acting as a meta-bridge between Conrad’s novel and the film itself. Eliot himself acknowledged that Conrad’s novel influenced the contents of the poem, especially the opening line “Mistah Kurtz – He Dead”, which refers to the passing of the novel’s imperialistic antagonist Kurtz. Ironically, this highlights the use of Kurtz himself as a relic, or disembodied presence, bridging across two texts.

Beyond the poem’s influence and fragmented recital in the film, the poem exists as a study of society withdrawing from the global conflict of the First World War. In this regard, it is a poem that triangulates the personal and the societal, burying itself in the space between the individual and the collective. In that space, Eliot evidences the emptiness of humanity, where morality is absent or at least harder to distinguish. The titular “hollow men” are recognised by Eliot as an assembly of those whose spiritual or moral selves can no longer be found. As vessels, they exist as motionless observers of a world in motion, carriers of absence.

On these terms, I could write endlessly about the significance of Eliot’s words against the backdrop of Apocalypse Now. It is my favourite film after all. But the context of the Vietnam War can be traded for the more relevant context of current Britain. Nia DaCosta’s film, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, like Coppola’s epic, excavates the moral territory left behind when society finds itself in recovery from a devastating event. Unlike Eliot’s post-war Britain, however, DaCosta’s vision of an oddly idyllic, green and hilly Britain, haunted by a hostile, zombified presence, creates a shocking contrast.

At its heart, DaCosta’s continuation of Danny Boyle’s 2002 classic is not about the horrors of a rampant infection, but more so about the degradation of humanity, as those infected and uninfected exercise moral bankruptcy and overwhelming violence. DaCosta’s film is not about the twisted fears of the late 90s and early 2000s. Instead, it is a looking glass into the decay of the world as it is now, where the divisions of religion, fears of outsiders, increasing risk of fundamentalism and extremism bleed out across our culture and society. Like Eliot’s poem, DaCosta’s film exists as a meditation on a 'hungover' world, where morality collapses and is in danger of making no recovery. Ironically enough, DaCosta’s film closes with the reintroduction of Cillian Murphy’s Jim, who is shown to be lecturing his daughter about the lessons learned following World War One and the economic punishment of Germany. Here, the film leans into Eliot’s ideas with profundity, demanding that we think about history and the repercussions of the past.

For Eliot, the titular “hollow men” exist as characters licensed by their emptiness. There is little evidence that suggests Eliot is targeting any specific tier of society, but instead the wholeness of society. This is explicitly illuminated by the use of the collective pronoun “we”, where the speaker addresses the reader through the collective voice of the hollow men. The speaker evolves their description of the hollow men, venturing into descriptions of fragility or weakness, such as “leaning”, “straw”, “quiet”, “meaningless”, and “dried”, among others.

Whereas the unified collective of the hollow men inspires us to locate strength in their togetherness, the use of these nouns, adjectives, and verbs establishes a troubling juxtaposition. Because of this, we are left to question whether Eliot’s interpretation of post-war Britain is of a society that is unified, yet vacant of any resolute power. The second stanza confirms this. The repetition of the adverb “without” emphasises the marriage of being with absence. Specifically, the phrase “shape without form” acts as a reminder of society’s frailty.

Due to the damage to infrastructure, population, and economy, Britain’s stability following the war was fragmented, leading to a moral vacuum. The significance of those left behind or who survived such a conflict became apparent as they were expected to live their lives devoid of the spiritual fabric that existed before the war. For some, faith in religion, government, and the security of personal philosophy waned. Via this lens, the speaker diagnoses a population that visually exists in the same “shape” as before, yet is “without” the “form” of a mutually shared reality.

DaCosta’s film tracks a similar fracture within society. However, in the context of this fictional modern Britain, the remaining population left behind following the apocalyptic exposure to the Rage virus is forced to react to a continued threat. In pockets, society is forced to splinter into groups, isolated amongst their own people. One of the protagonists, the young boy Spike, who still deals with the trauma of his mother’s passing from the previous film, and his disconnection from his home and father, exists in the polarised position of seeing his environment via its fragments.

At the film’s beginning, we are shown Spike amidst the challenge of gladiatorial combat against a psychopathic cult member, or a “Jimmy”. For the cult, the bloodthirst and Darwinian protocol of testing their own membership is an element of their newfound culture. In their togetherness and shared value, however, it becomes clear that their connection with humanity is absent. Their leader, Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), is explicit about the conditions of the cult throughout the film, opting to dialogue the ritualistic behaviours and expectations he has for his followers.

Beyond their claims of being a satanist cabal, the cult exists in the shaped conformity of Jimmy’s expectations, unified by their name (they are all called Jimmy, albeit with secondary nicknames), colourful tracksuits, and garish peroxide-blonde wigs. Their shape is solid and aesthetically bound together, yet despite these cohesive elements, the cult is also defined by its moral and ethical vacancy. Like the hollow men of Eliot’s poem, Jimmy’s cult evidences the ways in which society and humanity degrade following devastation.

The spiritual and moral void apparent in Spike’s initiation, where a majority of the cult exercises celebration at the suffering and death of their comrade at the hands of Spike, showcases how their humanity has been stripped and replaced with a compassion for brutal and savage gameplay. Later scenes add to this, where Jimmy and his followers describe the act of flaying fellow survivors as an act of “charity”, or when they toy with a survivor who is forced to bleed out during a similar initiation process.

But behind this violence, the absence of morality or authentic spirituality is made clearest when Jimmy is forced to threaten and coerce the holistic Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) into playing out the role of Satan to further influence his followers. At this point, Jimmy’s weakness is obvious. He, like the hollow men of the poem, exercises a performative identity to exist in a fractured world.

His fantastical role as a prophet of satanic values allows him to manipulate his followers further, using their own moral absence to convince them of his violent tendencies. However, unlike the metaphorical “straw” of Eliot’s hollow men, Jimmy’s cult is assembled from the remains of a fragmented jigsaw of pop culture references. They inhabit a desolate world in the garb and garish attire of the world that came before it.

The film’s writer, Alex Garland’s decision to incorporate the cultural dread of the renowned paedophile and sex offender Jimmy Savile into the fabric of the cult’s identity, reiterating this assemblage of identity from the materials of inorganic culture or histories. In this different timeline, where Savile’s crimes were not exposed, the irony of Jimmy and his followers absorbing the sartorial and follicle attributes speaks volumes to the audience.

For both the post-war and post-infection societies, the shape of society is dictated by the chimerical bonding of the past with a distorted understanding of the present, where existence brokers liminality from amongst the fragmentation of one long dead culture against the backdrop of a culture on its knees.

If Jimmy and his cult embody the performative hollowness of Eliot’s figures, those who compensate for their emptiness through ritual and spectacle, then Dr Kelson and Samson gesture towards something more complex, namely the fragile possibility of meaning after moral collapse. In the later sections of The Hollow Men, the speaker moves into a space defined by hesitation, repetition, and spiritual paralysis. The line “Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the Shadow” articulates a profound inability to translate intention into action. It is within this shadow that Kelson and Samson can be most clearly understood.

Dr Kelson exists in stark contrast to Jimmy’s constructed authority. Where Jimmy performs belief, Kelson appears to search for it, albeit through unconventional and deeply unsettling means. His holistic practices, his quiet composure, and his insistence on ritualised acts that blur the line between science and spirituality position him as a figure attempting to rebuild meaning in a world that has lost its moral framework. Yet, like Eliot’s hollow men, Kelson is not untouched by the surrounding void. His actions often seem suspended between healing and harm, intention and consequence. In this way, he inhabits Eliot’s shadow, a liminal space where ethical clarity is no longer accessible, and where even acts that aspire towards goodness are shaped and distorted by the conditions in which they occur.

Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), by contrast, represents a more tragic iteration of this condition. His presence evokes a sense of arrested purpose, a figure who, like the hollow men gathered on “this beach of the tumid river”, exists in a state of waiting rather than becoming. There is a quiet resignation to his character, a sense that whatever moral or spiritual direction he once possessed has been eroded by the world around him.

In Eliot’s poem, the hollow men are described as those who “dare not meet” the eyes of those in death’s kingdom. Similarly, Samson seems unable to fully confront either the past or the future. He is suspended, much like Eliot’s figures, in a perpetual present defined by uncertainty and unexplainable rage.

What distinguishes Kelson and Samson from Jimmy is that their hollowness is not performative but existential. They do not mask their emptiness with spectacle but endure it. This aligns closely with the final movement of The Hollow Men, where language itself begins to fracture into repetition and exhaustion, culminating in the quiet inevitability of “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper”. Eliot’s vision here is not one of dramatic collapse but of quiet dissolution, where meaning fades rather than shatters. The world ends not through rupture but through depletion, through the slow erosion of significance until only residue remains.

In this sense, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple extends Eliot’s meditation on disillusionment into a contemporary setting. If Apocalypse Now first translated Eliot’s vision into cinematic form, then DaCosta’s film suggests that this condition has not diminished but intensified. From Heart of Darkness through modern reinterpretations, the hollow man persists not as a figure of spectacle or destruction, but as one shaped by ongoing moral exhaustion. The world, as Eliot suggests, does not end in noise or catastrophe, but in quiet fragmentation, and it is within that quietness that both poetry and cinema continue to recognise the same unsettling truth.