The Girl with All the Gifts
horror Sky Premiere HD, 11.40am & 8pm/sky Premiere+1, 12.40pm & 9pm
Colm Mccarthy directs a gripping zombie thriller with a top-notch cast including Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine.
HORROR Sunday, Sky Premiere HD, 11.40am & 8pm
WHENEVER A ZOMBIE epidemic breaks out in a movie the chances are that the infected will be the carriers of some blood-soaked social commentary. Famously, George A Romero’s living dead series skewered imperialism, consumerism and similar ills, and his successors have followed suit with satirical critiques of their own.
The subtext in director Colm Mccarthy’s zombie film The Girl with All the Gifts, adapted by
Mike Carey from his own novel, is somewhat harder to find, but the existential horror of the story’s unsettling close is inescapable.
The story takes place in a near future where a fungal infection is turning humans into fast-moving, flesh-eating ‘hungries’. Ten-year-old Melanie (Sennia Nanua), a humanhungry hybrid with a genius IQ, may be the key to a possible cure.
Glenn Close’s furiously driven scientist Dr Caldwell certainly hopes so. But before she can find out, the army base in the Midlands where she is conducting her research is overrun by a horde of hungries, forcing a small group of survivors – including Melanie and
Caldwell, plus Gemma Arterton’s sympathetic teacher and Paddy Considine’s hard-nosed sergeant – to flee towards London, where further perils and revelations await.
Sadly, the film doesn’t make the most of its promising set-up. In such a well-worn genre, you can’t get away with having characters act with wilful stupidity just to advance the plot. However, Mccarthy does give us some startling images and some weighty moral issues to ponder. 2016, 15, 111min