10/5: The Girl with All the Gifts

 

First zombie movie of the year! Here's yesterday's film:

10/5

Up today was a movie that's been sitting on the horror master list that lives in the notes on my phone for years, The Girl with All the Gifts. So, zombie movies... I think we can all conclusively agree that zombie movies are overdone. They are the definition of a saturated market, with each one feeling less and less original than the last. At their worst (looking at you, The Walking Dead), zombie movies just rehash the same tired, lazy story lines of humans somehow being stupider than the zombies. At one point there was something fun about that, but now it's not good for much more than a yawn. Sometimes though a movie comes along that reminds you why zombie movies were actually original, scary, and entertaining once. The Girl with All the Gifts is, refreshingly, one of those movies. 

On the surface, The Girl with All the Gifts has all the hallmarks of your typical zombie movie: the world has been overtaken by zombies, there's a small military holdout trying like mad to find a cure, there's a potential cure in a young girl, etc. Nothing we haven't seen before. Where this film excels though is in the way it takes these tropes and manages to breathe new life into them (or undeath. Because zombies). The virus here is a fungus that's created your run-of-the-mill zombie as well as a "second generation" of zombies that maintain some form of intelligence and can even seem to be mostly human. It's in an especially gifted (see what I did there?) second generation zombie named Melanie that a hope for a cure exists.

Girl with All the Gifts revolves around Melanie, and similarly the movie revolves around the simply masterful performance of Sennia Nanua. Nanua creates a zombie who you somehow fall in love with in her innocent earnestness and are also terrified by in the implications she can have for the greater world. I haven't seen anything like it in zombie movie, and she did it all at just 13 years old. She shares the screen with Glenn Close, who shockingly stars in the movie as well, and is every bit as good of an actress as the veteran. That's saying something. 

Take Nanua's performance and group it with a refreshing take on zombies in general and a smart, thought-provoking ending and you have a contender for the créme de la créme of zombie movies. Does it still have the same dumb pitfalls of other zombie movies, i.e. human characters doing inanely stupid things? Of course. But there is so much here to love, I'm more than willing to overlook it.

9/10