Supermarkets no more. Television no more. Government no more. Law and order no more. No, not a dystopian re-working of Letter From America by the bespectacled troubadours from sunny Leith, but the stark setting of Scottish television director Colm McCarthy’s second feature film The Girl With All The Gifts adapted from the novel of the same name by Liverpudlian author Mike Carey who also penned the screenplay. Throw into the mix looted shopping malls, litter-strewn streets and a zombified population fuelled by an all-for-one and one-for-oneself mentality and you’d be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled across a top-secret simulation of Theresa May or may not’s right-wing policies of Austerity Britain.
But politics is far from the fold. In fact, the only real moral issue posed is “Why should it be us who die for you?” as voiced by Melanie (an impressive Sennia Nanua), a young black girl part-human part-zombie aka “a friggin abortion” who is asked by Dr. Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close) to sacrifice her life for the good of mankind so that a vaccine can be developed to rid the world of a deadly fungal virus, which has transformed most of the world’s population into a frenzied army of flesh-eating monsters known as “the hungries”. If it can benefit mankind to experiment on mice and rabbits, then why not on other sentient beings such as children like Melanie with a partial immunity to the deadly disease? And if the stakes are high, which they are (they don’t come much higher than “the end of the world”), then why not by force?
But even morals play second fiddle to lights, camera, action. For most of the film is a largely riveting game of cat and mouse between a handful of human beings with distinctive personalities and motivations and a horde of Hannibal Lecters after their pound of flesh and a nice Chianti. Paddy Considine plays a headstrong sergeant for whom shoot to kill comes as naturally as breathing. Under his command are Anthony Welsh’s alpha-male and Fisayo Akinade’s alpha-fail privates. Gemma Arterton is a maternal teacher whose emotional attachment to one of her specimens-cum-pupils compromises the army base in which she and her colleagues have sought refuge. Glenn Close’s single-minded doctor will stop at nothing to synthesise a vaccine from the brains and spines of young children. And holding the whole film together, teenage actress Sennia Nanua whose casting bodes well for the future of British cinema in redressing the lack of black and female leads.
After a taut opening in a military medical facility in which serried ranks of wheelchair-bound children are forced to learn the periodic table by rote in a scene straight out of a warped Stephen Hawking convention, the film rattles along at a steady pace as Melanie and Co escape from the compound and seek food and shelter in first the countryside and then the city. But after an hour or so, things start to go somewhat awry. There are only so many scenes you can watch of actors and extras snarling like zombies before the titter-o-meter swings to the right. And the lack of a clear dramatic focus towards the end sucks some of the life out of proceedings. But thanks to a fine cast, an otherworldly score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer and a special effects team who have made the most out of the film’s modest £4m budget, The Girl With All The Gifts is a gripping yarn, which proves that there’s still life in the zombie genre after all.
Video: Warner Bros. UK
[imdb id=tt4547056]