The Girl with All the Gifts (2016)

Directed by Colm McCarthy. Starring Sennia Nanua, Glenn Close, Paddy Considine, Gemma Arterton, Fisayo Akinade, Anamaria Marinca, Anthony Welsh. [R]

In an army facility several years after a parasite-borne zombie apocalypse ravaged the planet, scientist Close experiments on second-gen zombie children in an effort to find a cure. The undead young’uns crave human flesh, but also have the capacity to think, learn, and (sometimes) resist the hunger pangs, and pre-teen ghoul Melanie (Nanua) is an especially extraordinary specimen—will sympathetic teacher Arterton allow Close and her military supervisors to destroy the girl in order to harvest her body parts, and can Melanie be trusted not to give in to the cravings and turn on them? Taken from screenwriter Mike Carey’s same named short story, it’s admirable the filmmakers would try new ideas in a sub-genre that can so easily turn stale and redundant, but just when you think it’s about to get somewhere, it ends up not getting there, falling back on overworn devices and unoriginal plot progression—once the premise is established, why is there so little in the way of surprises or subtext to come? Stylistically generic direction gets the job done and no more; exposition-heavy dialogue would have benefited from a punch-up. Makes a tactical mistake in the insatiable ghoul design: adult chompy-zombies (dubbed “hungries”) who grunt, snarl and hiss like Gremlins are anything but terrifying; the dead-eyed child version, on the other hand…

47/100