Review: The Girl with All the Gifts (2016)

The Girl with All the Gifts (2016)

Rated R for disturbing violence/bloody images, and for language

Score: 4 out of 5

The Girl with All the Gifts by Mike Carey was one of my favorite recent horror novels. A zombie story influenced in equal parts by 28 Days Later, Day of the Dead, and The Last of Us, it had a cast of compelling characters, an interesting take on the idea of "smart zombies", and a far more hopeful ending than you usually find in the genre, especially given how it gets to that point. This film, written by Carey himself and remaining mostly faithful to the book, manages to convey a lot of the things I loved about it and translate them very well to the screen, anchoring it in a solid cast and plenty of creepy zombies that allow it to overcome a fairly slow and plodding second act. It's unique as far as zombie films go while still delivering the goods, adding up all around to a really good time.

Set in England several years into a zombie apocalypse that's pushed the remnants of humanity back to fortified military bases, the big twist that this film offers is that, when a pregnant woman is infected with the fungus that turns people into "hungries", it develops a symbiotic relationship with the fetus. The resulting child is born infected, with all the carnivorous urges of a zombie, but just as capable of intelligent thought as a normal human, and the military has been capturing and studying feral infected children in the hopes of finding a cure. This concept takes what Day of the Dead first did in 1985 and goes much further with it, showing the zombie children as capable of being educated like normal schoolchildren, as best evidenced by one of our main characters, Melanie. There's something of an uncanny valley effect to Melanie, who speaks and behaves like the most stereotypically British young girl you can imagine, completely unfazed by the mayhem around her, especially when she's walking amidst a horde of zombies that don't notice her because, for all intents and purposes, she is one of them biologically. Sennia Nanua, the actress who played Melanie, did an excellent job conveying this sense that there was something off about her, without ever playing up the weirdness for its own sake and feeling like she belonged in a Tim Burton movie. Most of the zombies are your typical modern infected, but the children offer a very different take on such, whether it's Melanie with her primary school education or, later on, a group of feral children who have built a tribal society. As much as it humanizes them, however, the film never forgets that they are fundamentally zombies, with everything that goes with that. It's established that all of the uninfected adult characters, even Melanie's teacher Helen Justineau who spends most of the movie bonding with her, are scared of her, and have to cover their skin in a blocking gel to mask their scent; when Sergeant Parks wipes some off his arm in Justineau's class in front of one of her students, the point he was making becomes patently obvious. And those feral kids I mentioned demonstrate what happens when human intelligence is combined with the feeding urges of a zombie, and it is nasty. The "neonates", as Dr. Caldwell calls them, are not harmless, and I was frequently left wondering if, or when, something might happen to cause Melanie to attack them.

The other zombies are themselves plenty creepy on their own, giving the film quite a few exciting action set pieces involving the main characters battling them, most notably the escape from the overrun military base early in the film that's filled with all manner of things going on but which I was always able to follow. The blocking gel lets the main characters move undetected through hordes of zombies, producing tense scenes where, thanks to the fact that zombies still react to sound, any false move could cause the horde to pounce on them -- scenes made especially eerie as the zombies, when they're not busy chasing prey, stand perfectly still. The actors were a cut above your usual B-grade horror movie; in addition to the aforementioned Nanua, the core trio of adult non-infected characters is comprised of Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, and Glenn Close, all of whom are outstanding. Arterton's Miss Justineau demonstrates a visible affection for the children under her care, seeing themselves as almost human much to the fury of Sergeant Parks, and after they're all forced to flee the military base, she develops a very interesting bond with the little one. She is frequently put up against both Considine's Parks and Close's Dr. Caldwell, neither of whom sees Melanie as truly human, though they both have very different ideas on what to do with her. Considine is great as the hard-assed military man who just wants to put a bullet in Melanie's zombie brain, the only reason he doesn't do so being that it's his mission to get her to a base called Beacon, and while casting Close as a heartless ice queen may be typecasting, there's a reason it's her type. I bought both her callousness towards Melanie's feelings as she planned to cut her open for experiments and her increasing discomfort with Melanie's human qualities, especially after a seemingly minor injury early in the film winds up going septic (one of the often-unstated joys of the apocalypse), forcing her to confront her own mortality and the fact that she has little time left to see through her experiments.

The middle of the film is where the writing doesn't quite translate as well to the screen, much of it devoted to scenes of the characters exploring the countryside and an abandoned London. It was truncated compared to the book, but even so, what worked great on the page felt fairly slow and plodding in a movie. There were some great scenes, from Melanie traipsing harmlessly through zombie-filled streets to Dr. Caldwell explaining in graphic detail how the "neonates" were born and what happened to their mothers, but there are just as many scenes where it feels like the characters are just wandering around, doing little to either advance the story or lend it any added depth and texture. There were also a few moments where, having read the book and knowing what was cut for time, I found myself wondering how the narrative was supposed to hold together for a viewer who didn't know how scenes were "supposed to" play out in the book. The movie remains quite watchable, though. While the backdrops of the post-apocalyptic landscape are often quite obviously CGI, there's still stylized enough that the effect reminded me of the charmingly old-school matte paintings used by many older movies to show out-of-this-world landscapes before computer effects were invented. At times, it offered an almost soothing feeling, not one I'd normally associate with a zombie horror film but one that worked regardless.

The Bottom Line

Both a faithful adaptation of a great novel and a very good film in its own right, The Girl with All the Gifts is an offbeat zombie flick that does something neat with its basic setup while still delivering everything you'd expect from a movie like it. Seek it out.