It's time for a bit of local flavour with today's review. When they were making The Girl With All The Gifts, they shot some scenes in a disused bus shelter and shopping centre about fifteen minutes from where I live - because apparently when you think post-apocalyptic zombie wastelands, you think of my town (and to be fair, it's not too bad an assessment). They had called for local people to come and be extras in the scenes they were shooting as well - playing zombies, obviously - and I briefly considered going down and trying out. In the end I decided against it though. You very rarely see fat zombies in horror, after all.
Melanie lives underground in a military base. Every day she is strapped into a wheelchair and taken to a classroom with a dozen or so other children like her and taught by teacher Ms Justineau, who Melanie loves. But there's something not quite right about Melanie and the other children - if they smell anything alive - human or animal - they turn feral and want to eat it. They're called "Hungries", humans turned into zombie-like creatures by a fungal infection, and the world is being overrun by them. When the base is overrun by Hungries, Melanie saves Ms Justineau and they and a trio of other survivors, including Dr Caldwell who claims Melanie's brain holds the cure to the fungal infection, head out to try to reach one of the other bases. Outside in the world for the first time, Melanie gets to learn about herself and the world she now lives in, and what the future holds for both her and the others like her, and the remaining uninfected humans...
The Girl With All The Gifts is based on the book of the same name by writer Mike Carey, which I read when it originally came out in 2014 (without knowing anything of the plot; I'm a fan of Carey's comic book work and figured a novel by him would be just as good). So I went into the film knowing everything that was going to happen and so can't really give an opinion on how most of the revelations are handled. I can say, however, that the film reveals most of these things much earlier than in the book, and in some cases in the trailer - the cause of the outbreak and Dr Caldwell's work on a cure, for example. I'm not 100% sure I agree with these plot points being revealed so early on, but at the same time they don't really harm the story and so I guess it's acceptable. It's also quite refreshing to have a zombie plague (yes, they're technically only zombies in the way that 28 Days Later or Mulberry Street had zombies) that has an origin that has some basis in science and nature (it's a mutated version of the cordyceps fungus, which infects ants and other insects in the real world with horrific effects) and which hasn't been used as much as other zombie plague varients, video game The Last of Us notwithstanding.
Another way in which The Girl With All The Gifts differs from the more traditional zombie narrative is the fact that the Hungries are not the driving force of the film. They're an ever-present threat, certainly, and several scenes involve having to creep past them in close quarters, hoping that they won't become alerted to the survivors' scent or sound, but the main drive of the movie is what the world is like now, where it is going and what each of the survivors will do with it. As a result, there's a lot less gore than in your usual zombie film - a few throats get bitten and someone gets their torso completely eaten - but it's much more about the suspense. Oh, and our protagonist Melanie does catch and kill a cat and a bird to eat, but the scenes are very brief and not there to shock or upset the audience with the death of helpless animals, but to illustrate a point that, for all our sympathies towards her, Melanie is still a predator and could be dangerous to her fellow survivors.
The Girl With All The Gifts has quite the impressive cast, including Gemma Arterton and none other than Glenn Close as the pragmatic antagonist Dr Caldwell. However, special mention has to go to the young actress who plays Melanie, Sennia Nanua. Playing a character that is both as simple and as complex as Melanie can't have been an easy task, but Nanua takes the character and really makes her real and sympathetic, from watching her do simple things like open and close a door at will (something she had never experienced in her life on the military base), to being prepared to fight and kill to protect Ms Justineau and the other survivors. Even decisions she makes that we might otherwise balk at, she manages to make more sympathetic and understandable, and if she continues in acting she's going to have a good career ahead of her.
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