Girl with All the Gifts (2016) [Blu-ray]
Drama | Horror | Thriller

Tagline: Our greatest threat is our only hope

A scientist and a teacher living in a dystopian future embark on a journey of survival with a special young girl named Melanie.

Storyline: In a dystopian near future, humanity has been ravaged by a mysterious fungal disease. The afflicted are robbed of all free will and turned into flesh-eating 'hungries'. Humankind's only hope is a small group of hybrid children who crave human flesh but retain the ability to think and feel. The children go to school at an army base in rural Britain, where they're subjected to cruel experiments by Dr. Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close). School teacher Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton) grows particularly close to an exceptional girl named Melanie (Sennia Nanua), thus forming a special bond. But when the base is invaded, the trio escape with the assistance of Sgt. Eddie Parks (Paddy Considine) and embark on a perilous journey of survival, during which Melanie must come to terms with who she is.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, April 21, 2017 Despite how unusual it is, remember this name: Sennia Nanua. Not to toot my own horn (at least not much, anyway), I'd refer you to my long ago Winter's Bone Blu-ray review where I trumpeted (sorry) the efforts of a then little known actress going by the name of Jennifer Lawrence, (correctly) predicting Academy Award nominations and a notable career for the actress, then just at the beginning of what has turned out to be a rather remarkable several years of prime film performances. Though Sennia is a good deal younger than even how quite young Lawrence was several years ago when Winter's Bone first appeared, I feel confident in making the same sort of prognostication with regard to this incredible little girl, one who more or less anchors The Girl With All the Gifts, a really interesting take on the by now tired zombie genre, despite the involvement of such other notables as Glenn Close and Gemma Arterton. It's notable that it takes a while for The Girl With All the Gifts to ultimately reveal its "Walking Dead" attributes, and indeed that's one of the best things about this often riveting film. Instead, The Girl With All the Gifts begins in medias res, documenting a patently weird situation where an apparently preternaturally sweet little girl named Melanie (Sennia Nanua) is kept isolated in a cell, allowed "out" (which means into other places in a secured bunker) only when she's securely strapped and confined to a wheelchair. While there are certain narrative elisions that screenwriter M.R. Carey (adapting his own novel) employs that perhaps could have been filled in a little better, it turns out Melanie is one of a gaggle of so-called "second generation" children who have been born in the wake of a huge fungal infection which has turned the vast bulk of humankind into, yep, zombies, or at least something akin to zombies. The children seem relatively normal until they catch a whiff of good old human "meat", at which point they transform rather abruptly into white eyed demons intent on having a snack (so to speak), hence the restraint systems that are in place. The Girl With All the Gifts is in many ways one of the more remarkable reimaginings of zombie lore, one that should appeal not just to devoted horror fans but also to those who like character based dramas that just happen to play out in a post-Apocalyptic environment.

Melanie's kind of melancholic existence doesn't seem to have affected her emotional outlook, at least not that she's willing to let on. This is one almost annoyingly polite and sweet little girl, one who greets the soldiers who keep her at gunpoint as she's strapped into her wheelchair and who scream at her favorite teacher Miss Justineau (Gemma Arterton) when Justineau caresses Melanie's head, something that is strictly off limits. The disease free humans regularly smear a "scent blocker" all over themselves, which makes them "invisible" (or whatever the olfactory equivalent to that is), and in an early and quite shocking reveal, martinet commander Sgt. Parks (Paddy Considine) smears a little saliva on his forearm and then dangles it in front of one of the kids, who lurches into spasms of zombieism, clacking his jaw manically as he attempts to get to the "food". Parks makes it quite clear that getting too close to any of these kids is a dangerous gambit. It's notable that virtually all of the soldiers in the film refer to each of the children, whatever their gender, as "it".

Melanie's sunny outlook extends to Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close), a researcher who regularly plies Melanie with various riddles (including the famous conundrum involving Schrödinger's cat) to see how smart the little girl is. Caldwell is working on a vaccine for the fungal outbreak, and it turns out she's dissecting various children in an attempt to harvest the appropriate antibodies to create the serum. Melanie is smart enough to figure out that when Caldwell asks Melanie to name a number between one and twenty, Melanie is in fact choosing who the next kid to undergo Caldwell's scalpel will be. Unsurprisingly, Melanie quickly proffers her own number, which in turn gets her outside for probably the first time in her life, as Parks and a bunch of armed escorts take the amazed little girl to Caldwell's lab.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, considering what's in store for little Melanie), the base is just then being overrun by hordes of "hungries", as this film terms those who have contracted the fungal disease. These particular zombies aren't confined to moving slowly, and in fact they kind of burst into hypersonic speed when they smell nearby munchables. In a kind of almost funny (but gruesome) sequence, the infected souls barge in on the lab, where Miss Justineau has already intruded, hoping to prevent the demise of Melanie. The upshot of everything is that the base is obviously compromised, and a small group of survivors, including of course Caldwell, Parks, Justineau and Melanie herself, set off into the outside world to try to find a safe haven and, perhaps, other uninfected humans.

It's here that The Girl With All the Gifts perhaps loses just a bit of momentum, with some character beats that probably aren't completely necessary. Ultimately, some folks make it and others don't (as should be expected), and there's a completely predictable plot point considering Caldwell that might have been handled a bit more artfully, but the general tone of this film is both completely distinctive and, finally, rather unexpectedly moving. The title of the film is an indirect reference to the story of Pandora, and in fact Melanie ends up unleashing a certain set of horrors herself in the film's fiery climax. But like the Greek goddess herself, Melanie refuses to give up hope, even in a world that seems inherently hopeless.

There are a couple of minor issues with The Girl With All the Gifts, including the ambivalence as to whether Melanie's "condition" leaves her incapable of resisting the urge to cannibalize or not (the film clearly presents it both ways, at different times). There are also some probably unintendedly comic moments when Melanie attempts to subdue feral children in scenes that play oddly like the Dawn of Man sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But overall this is an unusually thoughtful and viscerally effective piece of filmmaking, one that has an unexpected twist on the by now way too familiar zombie genre and one which caught me rather by surprise, delivering a uniquely compelling viewing experience. And best of all it also has an incredible performance by Sennia Nanua. You heard it here first. Technical merits are strong and The Girl With All the Gifts comes Highly recommended.

[CSW] -3.9- As I often remind folks good science fiction ends in an idea rather than an action. This was good Sci-Fi wrapped in an apocalyptic zombie movie. After the cause of the "hungries" is explained the question is can mankind find a cure using scientific methods? Are there enough uncontaminated people left and if not what is the outcome of the human race. It is billed as drama, horror, and thriller but I saw it as good philosophical sci-fi. If you look it as just a zombie movie with no philosophical or sci-fi overtones, it will seem a bit disappointing even though it is a pretty new take on that genre. But if you include those then the two twists at the end represent the expression of a great idea, and as I said before, good science fiction ends in an idea rather than an action making this a great science fiction film.
[V4.5-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


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