The Girl With All The Gifts

The Girl With All The Gifts dares to innovate in the rather saturated zombie market. It's a fair while since we've seen a post-apocalyptic film of this type in the cinemas, largely down to the success and brilliance of The Walking Dead which, of course, is able to tell a larger story.

Girl... is an adaptation of Mike Carey's novel and the treatment has been delivered by the author himself and directed by Colm McCarthy, known more for his TV work (such as Peaky Blinders). It's thoroughly British, set in London (but not filmed there) and starring British talent like Paddy Considine and Gemma Arteton.

This gives it a gritty feel, more akin to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later than The Walking Dead behemoth, and gives it a certain freshness. The aforementioned actors are exceptional as is the rest of the supporting cast.

Like the majority of modern 'zombies', or 'Hungries' as we call them here, the cause of the outbreak is a viral disease; manifesting itself here in a Rage-esque form; we're talking fast runners who work predominantly on the smell of live flesh or blood.

Carey's clever spin on the theme is to have a generation of unborn children who contract the disease whilst in the womb and, thankfully not shown, burst Alien-like out of their Mother's stomachs. These youngsters look, think, talk and appear like normal humans but possess the same desire for live food and uncontrollable rage when they get the smell of it.

Here's where our titular girl falls, along with a classroom full of others, who are imprisoned on a military base and, one-by-one, used as experiments to devise a cure to the wider infection. Of course, to be expected, all doesn't go to plan and one day, when a fence falls, our girl Melanie, her favourite teacher, a scientist and two soldiers are left out on the London streets.

The disease also has an end point; the bodies that carry it eventually 'die' and become plant-like seeds which join together to turn the infection into an airborne pathogen.

I won't divulge anymore but the classic zombie-tropes are here and requisite tension and jumps are on tap. Having Melanie, played brilliantly by young newcomer Sennia Nanua who's set for great things, as our guide through this world is a lovely twist on the formula; she can walk through groups of Hungries without being targeted and her motives, all the way to the brilliant kind-of-twist ending, are never explicitly clear.

It's all thoroughly on-point for any erstwhile fan of the post-apocalypse genre, or anyone at all for that matter, and is a real contender at the end of the year tally up. It's even a contender for my personal top five zombie (or equivalent) movies as well (currently I'd place it with 28 Days, Dawn Of The Dead, Zombieland, Shaun Of The Dead, I Am Legend and World War Z).

Properly brilliant.

4 stars ****