This film has popped up once or twice on my cinematic radar and yet time and again had managed to slip away unseen until this past weekend. I became much more interested in the film after watching the documentary Horror Noir about the intersection of horror media, principally film, and the depictions of black people in media.

The Girl with All the Gifts is a 2016 post-apocalyptic ‘zombie’ film directed by Colm McCarthy from a screenplay by Mike Carey who also write the original short story and adapted the material into a novel of the same name. Glenn Close stars as Dr Caldwell a medical scientist searching for a vaccine against the fungus that creates the ‘hungries.’ (First rule of up-scale ‘zombie’ movies, never use the word ‘zombie.’) Caldwell works at a remote military installation where a number of children who are infected with the fungus but present as normal children most of the time are studied and dissected in the search for the vaccine. Gemma Arterton plays Helen Justineau a teacher schooling the class of children. Her star pupil is Melanie, played by Sennia Nanua with a skill and competence that promises a bright future as an actor if she chooses to pursue one. Melanie is fantastically bright, charming, inquisitive, and helpful except when she is taken by her feral hunger which can be aroused with a simple smell of human skin. When the base falls to a horde of hungries the three characters along with an Army Sergeant and another solider are forced to flee across territory abandoned to the hungries in an attempt to reach another secure facility near London. Along the way tension erupt between Caldwell need to use Melanie to produce a vaccine and Justineau’s growing affection for the bright friendly girl.

I placed the word ‘zombie’ in quotes not only because the film uses the term hungries but also that these infected are not living dead revenants. In theory these are simply human infect with a parasitic fungus that has usurped control undoubtedly inspired by the spores that does the same to some species of ants. However, in practical considerations the Hungries fall under the ‘fast zombie’ trope and are generally as mindless as previous cinematic generations of the undead. While the film attempts to create a plausible scientific basis for its unending hordes of hungries it is best to place to one side any actual scientific knowledge while watching the feature. Considerations for how quickly a mindless automaton would succumb to hunger and dehydration are typically ignored as are basic tactical operations that would render any well-armed force immune to the horde’s wave attacks. That said this is a really an excellent film that shares a lot of thematic components with Richard Matheson’s I Am Legendnovel. It is currently streaming on Netflix and while violent it does not luxuriate in the gore but rather focuses on idea of identity and character. It is well worth watching.