The Girl With All The Gifts

Warning: contains spoilers for The Girl With All The Gifts

I want to like zombie films.  I really do.  I like the idea of them becasue I like the questions that they pose.  I like the analogies that can be drawn, and I like that zombie movies have historically pointed to the things that society fears most and said "yeah?  What would you do about this?".

TV has explored a vast array of possibilities in zombie-land.  Example: In The Flesh, which essentially asks "if you could 'cure' zombie-ness, how would you reintegrate all those people back into society, and how would you make that society safe?" (analogies to crime, punishment, and addiction).  Example: The Walking Dead, which asks "if society as we know it were to end right now, would we cling to the social structures that we've always had (even though the society they were created for is now defunct) in the hope that society 'grows back' to what it was, or would we start a new set of rules and social structures, and who would make those?

All very interesting things to muse. 

Problem:  I don't really like zombie films.  Mainly because of the complete and utter lack of hope in them.  As a character in a zombie film, you run and run and hide and hide and ultimately it is all for naught because just when you think you're safe you get got.  No matter how clever or how dumb, no matter how careful or how reckless.  Now, maybe that's a big old metaphor for life, but that in itself is a depressing thought so I'll not look at it too closely.

So very bleak...

Why did I go to see The Girl With All The Gifts?  I don't know.  Can't remember.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.  But what did I think...

Actually, this is a great piece of storytelling.  It opens with Melanie (Sennia Nanua), a ten-ish year old girl whose room is a cell, who willingly hops into a wheelchair every morning and allows herself to be shackled by armed guards and taken to a classroom full of children just like her - tiny Hannibal Lecters in their tiny orange tracksuits.  She seems bright, interested and eager to please.  The soldiers hate her.  They hate all the children.  The exceptions to this are Helen (Gemma Arterton) - her teacher, who seems distressed by the children's plight, and fills their minds full of the stories of Greek mythology - and Dr Caldwell (Glenn Close) - who engages with Melanie and poses her puzzles and riddles, with curiousity and scientific detachment.  We aren't really sure why any of this is happening, until Ed (Paddy Considine) angrily reminds Helen why they don't touch the children as he holds his arm in front of one child, who goes rigid and rabid and tries to bite him, teeth chattering like clockwork toys.  They are the "Hungries" (our word for "zombies" in this film).

Melanie as baby Hannibal Lecter

As per zombie film rules, the status quo is destroyed, the defences are breached and a small central group find themselves having to work together in order to survive - namely Melanie, Helen, Ed, Dr Caldwell and Kieran (another soldier). Along the way they consider each other, their safety, their biases and their motivations.  Each persons argument is equally wrong and right based on their direct experience.  There is no "bad guy".  Except simultaneously, everybody is kind of the "bad guy".  The zombie-creator in this instance is a fungus, which essentially uses the host as a kind of grow bag and , eventually consumes it from within.  The zombies (when not attacking) look peaceful, vacant, mouldy.

The film stands out because of its storytelling.  There are no massive info dumps, no long conversations about why things are as they are (which makes sense - all the characters have lived through this apocalyptic crisis.  They have no need to question what they already know).  The questions get answered at the point where the audience are starting to ask them.  Unusually (possibly because the film is based on a book) some of the most horrible points come from a throwaway line by a character, not necessarily the action that we see (for example, the retelling of where Melanie came from). 

Just look at the trailer and tell me you're not intrigued...

Visually, the film is beautiful.  London has the same emptiness as 28 Days Later, with added foliage.  The overgrown BT Tower is particularly noteworthy.  It's a world that is very familiar but very other.  We can pick out the familiar, but it's not quite of our world.  There are small tiny inadvertent jokes, like the zombies herding below a sign for M&S "Simply Food".  The soundtrack by Cristobel Tapia de Veer (he of Utopia and National Treasure) adds unnerving discord and pathos.

The conclusion was divisive amongst the group I saw the film with.  I found the ending bleak, as per my experience of zombie films.  Others found it hopeful and uplifting based on the fate of Helen - she survives in a mobile lab, isolated, teaching two different generations of zombie children.  She is alive and well, but unable to experience the outside world - the only one left of that particular generation.  But life goes on.  And maybe that's where the hope is.  it's not necessarily the life that we know, or even the one we would choose, but life continues.  It always continues.

Afterthought:  what does the title refer to?  Melanie has a gift - she is one who is not quite one of the "Hungries", nor one of the humans.  She is a human Venn-diagram and can move between both groups in relative safety.  And that's a gift.  What are the others?