Taking place in the not-to-distant, dystopian future where humanity has been ravaged by a mysterious fungal disease, turning the afflicted into flesh-eating 'hungries', Colm McCarthy's The Girl With All The Gifts is the latest film to take advantage of pop culture's zombie obsession, offering up one of the more unique spins on the subgenre. A film which manages to satisfy both those viewers who simply want their fix of bloodlust, as well as viewers who are looking for a little more introspection with their horror, The Girl With All The Gifts presents itself as a tense, thought-provoking, survival story, one that challenges the viewer to question the value of life, the desperation of survival, and ultimately the morality associated with the loss of any form of human life. Keeping the viewer in the dark early on as to what exactly is going on, The Girl With All The Gifts' opens on an army base in rural England, where we are introduced to a small group of children, hybrids, who crave human flesh but also retain the cognitive abilities. Endlessly experimented on in an attempt to find a cure by Dr. Caroline Caldwell, these children are kept under lock-and-key, something which Helen, a school teacher assigned to educate the hybrid children, grows somewhat tiresome of as she grows close to these children, specifically Melanie, an exceptional young woman. When the base is invaded by a host of 'hungries', Helen, Melanie, Dr. Caroline, and a few other soldiers manage to escape in the nick of time, which sets in motion an expedition of survival which in turn helps Melanie come to terms with exactly who and what she is. Colm McCarthy's The Girl With All The Gifts is a film that works more so than it doesn't due to it being more dedicated to its characters and thematic ideals about morality than serving the typical tropes of the zombie genre. The Girl With All The Gifts' doesn't even reveal itself as a zombie-style film until a good 30 minutes into the film, opting instead early on to build the sense of intrigue about its characters, establishing Melanie as a gifted, yet dangerous young woman, something which everyone on the base is fearful towards, except Helen, who sees Melanie as nothing more than a scared child. This attention to character early on in the film pays off in the back-half, as The Girl With All The Gifts revels itself as a rejection of barbarianism, using the tropes of the zombie genre to comment on humanities nature to fear what it doesn't understand, with Dr. Caroline being so driven to solve the cure that she rejects the obvious humanity of these hybrid children, individuals themselves who cognitively are barely any different than those unaffected by this harmful pathogen. Empathy over barbarianism is the film's overlying principle, deconstructing the morality associated with life itself, asking the fundamental question of whether extinguishing life is ever clearly justified. In a sense, The Girl With All The Gifts is a coming-of-a-age story, a survival narrative that finds young Melanie come to accept who she is, a character who comes to embrace those things which she herself cannot control, while discovering and finding comfort in who she is as a person. For those interested in another fun, violent, zombie-film, The Girl With All The Gifts should strike your fancy too, but it's the film's more introspective ideas related to morality and barbarianism that makes the film worth seeking out.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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