Review of The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) by Lane Z — 06 Mar 2017

In a day and age where Hollywood has become so overbearing when it gets hold of an idea (see anything super hero for example), zombies have taken a slight back seat in recent years. It's not that they exhausted the genre by any means, but finding new and inventive ways to tell the same tried and true story can be difficult.

That's why it's nice to see The Girl with All the Gifts buck the traditional zombie trend and focus on more thought-provoking questions than mindless killing and all-out survival by giving us a character who teeters on the edge of both afflicted and human.

I wouldn't say Melanie, played by Sennia Nanua, is a heightened human reaping the benefits of a super-strength virus. It's more along the lines of living with what you've been given. So this is a tragedy. While the acting is fairly substantial with Glenn Close, Gemma Arteton and Paddy Considine lending their expertise, the script never reaches beyond the dialogue to really offer us a solution to the problem.

This film felt nearly identical to The Last of Us video game. For anyone who has played that A+ game, this movie might feel a little light when compared. It's nice to see someone give a new take on the zombie genre, but we don't stray far enough from the usual to really have a standout film.