The Girl with All the Gifts 2016 Movie

What’s interesting about Melanie: The Girl with All the Gifts is how it manages to breathe new life into a genre that seemed exhausted. From the start, the story feels familiar —infection, survival, divided groups— but it approaches it from a different angle, one that leans more on reflection than on cheap scares. Melanie’s relationship with the adults sets the tone early on. This isn’t the typical “humans versus zombies” setup, but something more unsettling and complex: what happens when the so-called “enemy” is a child who can think, feel, and empathize? That ambiguity makes every scene more disturbing than expected. At times, the movie recalls Lord of the Flies, especially when the characters are forced to survive in a world without rules, testing their morals as much as their strength. The tension doesn’t just come from the infected, but from the difficult choices the survivors must face. Colm McCarthy directs with restraint, keeping things grounded and solid. Glenn Close and Gemma Arterton deliver strong performances, but it’s Sennia Nanua who leaves the deepest impression: her acting balances innocence and menace in a way that feels both surprising and powerful. Beyond suspense and action, what lingers most is the underlying question: do we keep fighting for the world we know, or do we accept that the future may belong to someone else? That doubt runs through the entire story, giving the film a philosophical weight that sets it apart from others in the genre. Without reinventing the formula completely, The Girl with All the Gifts stands out as an intense, original, and memorable work. It’s the kind of film that sticks with you, because in the end it speaks less about zombies and more about us.

While the man-eating fungus-body-snatcher-plague is by no means original, the serious portrayal of a zombie apocalypse in The Girl with All the Gifts is one of the best. It's hard to believe they managed to do all they did on screen with such little budget (less than $5 million). The derelict natural-takeover landscapes are stunning and the fungal evolution is otherworldly and interesting. There's some extremely tense moments in this film and it achieves horror without reliance on jump scares or gratuitous gore. All that being said, the film's finale is poorly executed. Did the soldiers just decide to abandon all reason for the sake of wrapping up the plot? The teacher just accepts the near total genocide of the human race after a few tears? In the end, the Girl may be somewhat human, but she is absent of any humanity... And in this case, quite "literally worse than Hitler."