The Girl With All The Gifts is an adaptation of a novel about a little girl named Melanie who is locked up and confined with a number of other children to a military facility run by a soldier played by Paddy Considine. Melanie, played by Sennia Nanua, is charming, engaged in the world and frightfully treated by all except her favorite teacher, Miss Justineau, played by Gemma Atherton, and Dr. Caldwell, played by Glenn Close. Then the story pulls back and reveals why Melanie’s world is so confining and abusive. The Girl With All The Gifts shows how Melanie transforms as her world expands. The Girl With All The Gifts is the Snowpiercer of zombie movies except even more devastatingly challenging and condemning. The Girl With All The Gifts is a must see film.
I’m actually mad that no one informed me if and when The Girl With All The Gifts was in theaters. It seems plausible that The Girl With All The Gifts never played in Massachusetts theaters because for God’s sakes, I found Maggie, and no one saw Maggie in theaters. I would have happily paid money to see The Girl With All The Gifts in theaters. A black girl plus zombies meant that The Girl With All The Gifts was a must see for me. Why does Maggie get to be in theaters and not The Girl With All The Gifts? Arnold Schwartzenegger? The Girl With All The Gifts’ entire cast is amazing, and Close only plays a supporting role, but are you telling me that a movie of this quality with a powerful actor like Close can’t get any love from even art house theaters!?! Shameful.
The Girl With All The Gifts never lost my attention or became predictable for the entire 1 hour 51 minutes. The Girl With All The Gifts is an amazing world, and I am eager to read the book. I do not play video games, and subsequent to watching the film, I discovered that it may have similarities to The Last of Us so if you are an avid gamer, I warn you that my entire perspective may be different from how you will view The Girl With All The Gifts. What is completely terrifying about this apocalypse is that it already exists in our world. There is a pathogenic fungus that hijacks insects’ central nervous system to alter their physical behavior and transform the ant’s body to release spores and create more fungus that in turn infects other insects, which is great news for the fungus, but bad news for the ants. One person’s apocalypse is another person’s good fortune.
What makes The Girl With All The Gifts such a mind-bendingly, provocative experience is that you see the world through Melanie’s eyes, and Melanie does not share our values although there is a Venn diagram of how we are like Melanie. When a little girl has a photo of a kitten, we think that it is cute, but it is something entirely different. Name one child who has not chased a pigeon. To the viewers and the people who initially control her world, Melanie is a mystery or something that exists to solely benefit their existence, but The Girl With All The Gifts constantly corrects us. She is a sentient being with her own desires, ideas and fears, and we mistakenly project our own agenda upon her instead of simply treating her with the respect and autonomy that we would treat each other. Is The Girl With All The Gifts a critique of the lack of intersectionality in our world or am I projecting? The Girl With All The Gifts critiques anyone who questions the authenticity of her existence just because it is different from his or her existence. To diminish her intelligence as mimicry is like when sports commentators use the phrase strategy for some athletes and innate physical ability for others.
The Girl With All The Gifts is a cautionary tale for society about how we demonize others. The casting only adds to the texture of the film: Melanie is a black girl. In a day and age when black girls are routinely body slammed by grown men whether they are dressed in bikinis or sitting sullenly at a school desk, Melanie’s plight does not need to be set in a sci-fi dystopian world. People already treat black girls with disproportionately more physical and psychological harm than is warranted by any actual behavior because their existence is seen inherently as a threat. Schools are already policed and become pipelines to incarceration. The dystopian premise only provides an understandable and relatable rationale for the perpetrators’ dehumanization of Melanie despite her evident intelligence and personality, but it does not exempt them from condemnation.
Just because The Girl With All The Gifts makes viewers and Melanie empathize with and not hate Melanie’s captors does not mean that there are no consequences for their behavior. The Girl With All The Gifts suggests that the brutal world that you give the least of these is what you do unto yourself. They taught Melanie well. If they don’t like the society that Melanie creates, they have no one to blame but themselves. She learned it by watching you!
The Girl With All The Gifts never places Melanie into any tragic mullato/daywalker tropes. I was concerned that The Girl With All The Gifts would become a tragic Charlie or Flowers for Algernon story, but it never does. Melanie is fine with being Schrodinger’s cat, a moral killer, a Pandora who puts both the evil and hope within humanity back in the box. Her existence is not a problem to be solved. She just is. She picks and chooses which experiences she embraces from both societies to create her own and finds clever and unexpected ways to navigate the world.
One way that Melanie learns how to live is through stories. Without being pedantic, The Girl With All The Gifts uses Greek mythology and alludes to Lord of the Flies and fairy tales to create a rich internal life for Melanie before she emerges into the real world. The stories shape who she is, and her creativity in turn gives her agency to write her own story when she is finally free. Casting Melanie as a black girl makes this evolution shift more plausible because black girls have to excellently navigate all worlds to survive. Melanie learns about then morally corrects the world: children don’t die for their parents. Melanie then shapes the world to fit that principle.
On a less provocative note, The Girl With All The Gifts can also be seen as a story about the disillusionment of life as a now unwilling parent. Melanie and her schoolmates are called abortions. The adults treat them like bad children or a problem. Parents imagine an expected child to emerge one way and can react negatively when reality does not match expectations. Parents think that they should control the child and determine a child’s existence. Parents can fail to recognize that to some degree, even a young child should be able to live independently from the parents’ control particularly if it is unhealthy or abusive. The Girl With All The Gifts provocatively takes parenthood to an extreme-you should be willing to give and do anything to give your kids a better life than you had. Hungry moms give their lives. You should be willing to give them the world.
The Girl With All The Gifts has unexpected moments of humor and subtle product placements (Barclay’s, Mercedes Benz. The Girl With All The Gifts even gave a shout out to Rosalind Franklin (Assassin’s Creed, I’m looking at you). Of course the teacher had to touch Melanie’s hair. Only one tiny complaint: shouldn’t the hungries be able to smell a rat (stupid jump scare)?
The Girl With All The Gifts is a mercilessly provocative and subversive film with a terrific ensemble, a riveting story and a verdant, beautiful desolate landscape. See it as soon as possible even if you are not a fan of zombie films.