Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

The Girl with All the Gifts Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 21, 2017

Despite how unusual it is, remember this name: Sennia Nanua. Not to toot my own horn (at least not much, anyway), I’d refer you to my long ago Winter's Bone Blu-ray review where I trumpeted (sorry) the efforts of a then little known actress going by the name of Jennifer Lawrence, (correctly) predicting Academy Award nominations and a notable career for the actress, then just at the beginning of what has turned out to be a rather remarkable several years of prime film performances. Though Sennia is a good deal younger than even how quite young Lawrence was several years ago when Winter’s Bone first appeared, I feel confident in making the same sort of prognostication with regard to this incredible little girl, one who more or less anchors The Girl With All the Gifts, a really interesting take on the by now tired zombie genre, despite the involvement of such other notables as Glenn Close and Gemma Arterton. It’s notable that it takes a while for The Girl With All the Gifts to ultimately reveal its “Walking Dead” attributes, and indeed that’s one of the best things about this often riveting film. Instead, The Girl With All the Gifts begins in medias res, documenting a patently weird situation where an apparently preternaturally sweet little girl named Melanie (Sennia Nanua) is kept isolated in a cell, allowed “out” (which means into other places in a secured bunker) only when she’s securely strapped and confined to a wheelchair. While there are certain narrative elisions that screenwriter M.R. Carey (adapting his own novel) employs that perhaps could have been filled in a little better, it turns out Melanie is one of a gaggle of so-called “second generation” children who have been born in the wake of a huge fungal infection which has turned the vast bulk of humankind into, yep, zombies, or at least something akin to zombies. The children seem relatively normal until they catch a whiff of good old human “meat”, at which point they transform rather abruptly into white eyed demons intent on having a snack (so to speak), hence the restraint systems that are in place. The Girl With All the Gifts is in many ways one of the more remarkable reimaginings of zombie lore, one that should appeal not just to devoted horror fans but also to those who like character based dramas that just happen to play out in a post-Apocalyptic environment.

Melanie’s kind of melancholic existence doesn’t seem to have affected her emotional outlook, at least not that she’s willing to let on. This is one almost annoyingly polite and sweet little girl, one who greets the soldiers who keep her at gunpoint as she’s strapped into her wheelchair and who scream at her favorite teacher Miss Justineau (Gemma Arterton) when Justineau caresses Melanie’s head, something that is strictly off limits. The disease free humans regularly smear a “scent blocker” all over themselves, which makes them “invisible” (or whatever the olfactory equivalent to that is), and in an early and quite shocking reveal, martinet commander Sgt. Parks (Paddy Considine) smears a little saliva on his forearm and then dangles it in front of one of the kids, who lurches into spasms of zombieism, clacking his jaw manically as he attempts to get to the “food”. Parks makes it quite clear that getting too close to any of these kids is a dangerous gambit. It’s notable that virtually all of the soldiers in the film refer to each of the children, whatever their gender, as “it”.

Melanie’s sunny outlook extends to Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close), a researcher who regularly plies Melanie with various riddles (including the famous conundrum involving Schrödinger's cat) to see how smart the little girl is. Caldwell is working on a vaccine for the fungal outbreak, and it turns out she’s dissecting various children in an attempt to harvest the appropriate antibodies to create the serum. Melanie is smart enough to figure out that when Caldwell asks Melanie to name a number between one and twenty, Melanie is in fact choosing who the next kid to undergo Caldwell’s scalpel will be. Unsurprisingly, Melanie quickly proffers her own number, which in turn gets her outside for probably the first time in her life, as Parks and a bunch of armed escorts take the amazed little girl to Caldwell’s lab.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, considering what’s in store for little Melanie), the base is just then being overrun by hordes of “hungries”, as this film terms those who have contracted the fungal disease. These particular zombies aren’t confined to moving slowly, and in fact they kind of burst into hypersonic speed when they smell nearby munchables. In a kind of almost funny (but gruesome) sequence, the infected souls barge in on the lab, where Miss Justineau has already intruded, hoping to prevent the demise of Melanie. The upshot of everything is that the base is obviously compromised, and a small group of survivors, including of course Caldwell, Parks, Justineau and Melanie herself, set off into the outside world to try to find a safe haven and, perhaps, other uninfected humans.

It’s here that The Girl With All the Gifts perhaps loses just a bit of momentum, with some character beats that probably aren’t completely necessary. Ultimately, some folks make it and others don’t (as should be expected), and there’s a completely predictable plot point considering Caldwell that might have been handled a bit more artfully, but the general tone of this film is both completely distinctive and, finally, rather unexpectedly moving. The title of the film is an indirect reference to the story of Pandora, and in fact Melanie ends up unleashing a certain set of horrors herself in the film’s fiery climax. But like the Greek goddess herself, Melanie refuses to give up hope, even in a world that seems inherently hopeless.

The Girl with All the Gifts Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Girl With All the Gifts is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in (the somewhat unusual aspect ratio of) 2.00:1. This is another film where the IMDb is dataless on the technology utilized, but some other online sources credit the Alexa as the camera of choice. This has a typically sharp and well detailed look most of the time, but it seems that some sequences, notably some of the first scenes in the complex where Melanie is being more or less held as a prisoner have either been shot or tweaked to be a bit on the soft side. The film's clarity perks up considerably once things get outdoors, though the palette is fairly tamped down, especially for a supposed zombie film. A lot of the film plays out in rather subdued shades of green, yellow and tan, and even some of the gore (and there is gore in this film) doesn't totally exploit vividly saturated hues.

The Girl with All the Gifts Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Girl With All the Gifts has an effective DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, one that capably details the claustrophobic confines of Melanie's "prison" before expanding to a naturalistic presentation when the little girl and the adults accompanying her get outside (there are frequent bird chirps which seem to accompany or at least follow some of Melanie's feeding frenzies). The film regularly exploits LFE with bursts of machine gun fire as the soldiers attempt to "kill the head" (to reference one of the more iconic zombie outings). Fidelity is fine throughout, supporting both effects and dialogue.

The Girl with All the Gifts Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Unwrap the Secret World of The Girl With All the Gifts (1080p; 20:45) is an okay EPK that has some fun interviews and candid footage, especially of Glenn Close, who looks like she's kind of a goofball on set.

The Girl with All the Gifts Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There are a couple of minor issues with The Girl With All the Gifts, including the ambivalence as to whether Melanie's "condition" leaves her incapable of resisting the urge to cannibalize or not (the film clearly presents it both ways, at different times). There are also some probably unintendedly comic moments when Melanie attempts to subdue feral children in scenes that play oddly like the Dawn of Man sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But overall this is an unusually thoughtful and viscerally effective piece of filmmaking, one that has an unexpected twist on the by now way too familiar zombie genre and one which caught me rather by surprise, delivering a uniquely compelling viewing experience. And best of all it also has an incredible performance by Sennia Nanua. You heard it here first. Technical merits are strong and The Girl With All the Gifts comes Highly recommended.