The Girl with All the Gifts
                
Director: Colm McCarthy
Year: 2016
Rating: 7.5
"Would you like to have a cat?" "I just had one, thanks" as the blood around her mouth and on her shirt attests. Egads. I stumbled into a zombie movie by mistake, Took a wrong turn. I had seen something that praised the performance of the young teenage actress Sennia Nanus as a positive example of a black person getting a role that was not written for a black. Just the best person for the role. The way it should be. So, I had no idea what this was about. I hit the wall with zombie movies a few years back. Way too many of them. They are all like Agatha Christie"s And Then There Were None on a larger scale as we watch one character after another getting the zombie treatment.  The Night of the Comet is still my favorite. Seen none of the Day of the Dead movies. Or that TV show. Zombies bore me. They have so little character development. Not much personality. So little back story. They are just hungry dead people. Train to Busan was fun for the human element and the Korean TV show Kingdom has Bae Doo-na in it. Which is enough to watch anything. But by the time I realized zombies were in this, it was too late. I was in too deep. And I was intrigued. Pulled in by a baffling beginning. Where was this going to go.



Melanie (Sennie) is awake in a small room with no windows. She is counting. Footsteps are heard from outside and she immediately gets into a wheelchair and begins to strap herself in. The door opens and two soldiers with guns pointed at her finish the strapping. Melanie welcomes them with a cheery good morning. She is pushed outside into the corridor where a number of other children are also being pushed. To a classroom where the female teacher Justineau (Gemma Arterton) teaches them. But something is clearly off. Why are these children being treated like this, why are the soldiers afraid of them and being called abortions by the soldiers.



Because in a sense they are. Self-abortions. The world outside this facility is dying. A contagious fungus that wraps itself around your brain has turned much of the population into zombie like creatures called Hungries who rampage in groups looking for food. For humans. Or cats. Or dogs. They are winning. They are fast. Work in co-ordination. Seemingly there are only a few human holdouts left in England. Melanie and the other children are between Hungries and something else. Their mothers were pregnant with them when they caught the disease and stopped feeding their babies. So, they ate their way out. Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close) thinks she is nearing a vaccine but to do so she has to dissect the children. It is Melanie's turn. A totally sweet child - except when she smells meat. Or humans. Then she turns voracious. Loses control. Thousands of Hungries are at the gates breaking in - they smell humans, their jaws start clicking and gyrating. A couple soldiers, Melanie,  Justineau and Caldwell escape in an armored truck. There is a long ways to go and the Hungries are everywhere. And its Agatha Christie time again. This works on a couple levels - the creepy level but also the personal one. You do care what happens to them. What happens to our world.