The Girl
with All the Gifts
(2016)
(SPOILERS)
Colm McCarthy directed the less-than-estimable Doctor Who story The Bells of
Saint John, which memorably, in an entirely negative way, featured Matt
Smith riding up a skyscraper on a motorbike. While this was in no way
McCarthy’s fault, it was suggestive that he had, in some past life, horribly affronted
the Fates and would be paying penance via untold degradations for many future
incarnations to come. He also performed a stint on Steven Moffat’s increasingly
risible Sherlock, before making an
appreciable mark on the second series of Peaky
Blinders. The Girl with All the Gifts
is his first since that stint, and he takes to it like a director with
something to prove, so much so that, for all that screenwriter Mike Carey’s
spin on the zombie genre is unique and distinctive, it’s down to its director
and a phenomenal junior performance from newcomer Sennia Nanua that it’s as effective
as it is.
McCarthy’s
subjective lens is with Nanua’s Melanie throughout, but particularly so during
the opening section, in which we are introduced to the concrete underground
world she inhabits with her fellow detainee children. We see them confined to
cells and wheel-chaired to class in restraints, but initially have as little
information on the whys and wherefores of this imprisonment as she has (less
even). The scenario echoes the doomed subterranean military research facility
of Day of the Dead, but rather than a
crude, schlocky focus on these child “hungries” who only reduce to the
instinctive state of their perma-zombie adult equivalents when roused by
bloodlust, it encourages a pointed metaphor for how easy it is to rationalise
seeing others as “other”, and so undeserving of our empathy and respect.
Indeed,
rather than a fleeting or diverting layer of the picture, this is established
as the entire point, one that is nurtured all the way through to the final
scene; it is no coincidence that Helen (Gemma Arterton in possibly her best
performance; it’s certainly up there with Byzantium)
survives the fungal apocalypse, the only character to maintain consistent human
feeling and decency towards the test subjects. Melanie is able to traverse the
various worlds, unconditioned towards judgement of others but astonishingly
quick on the uptake in what ought to be new and bewildering situations.
This
culminates in her recognition that the price Dr Caldwell (Glenn Close) requests,
through her clinician’s eyes, that Melanie sacrifice herself for the (only possible) salvation of a humanity on its
last legs, is forfeit. Caldwell is appealing to a one-sided utilitarianism, crystallised
for Melanie when the doctor admits that, having spent her entire time rejecting
the possibility that Melanie and her ilk are sentient, she is indeed human, and she was wrong. It would have been understandable
if Melanie’s decision to spurn Caldwell’s plea was solely about the “Why should we die for you?” (as in, Melanie,
having endured physical hardship and verbal abuse, treated as a thing rather
than a person, all the time with an eager smile on her face and an unerringly
upbeat disposition).
It’s a
development paralleled by the earlier scene in which she volunteers her own
cell number to Caldwell, having realised the “think of a number” game is a
means for the doctor to pick the next dissection subject; Melanie would sacrifice herself for a cause, but
the cause would have to be just in her philosophy. The sequence also provides a
basis for her developing authority; the last scene positions her as the leader incarnate
of a new civilisation (not too far off from Planet
of the Apes’ Caesar), bringing knowledge to the city’s feral children as
Helen, from the protection of a sealed lab, provides them with the tools for
taking their heritage.
Some have
seen Melanie’s behaviour throughout as entirely calculated, but I think it
reads on several levels. On one hand, her decision to release the spores has a
childlike impulsiveness and is imbued with her penchant for storytelling, in
that she seeks to protect those who have simply been nice to her in her
immediate frame of reference and fairy tale narrative, without any attention to
all the other humans she will turn to hungries who might also have treated her
fairly given a chance; Parks and Helen will be okay, and that is enough. On the
other, it isn’t a decision Helen would have made, but most certainly one
Caldwell would have, situations reversed. But of course, Melanie has already
shown she is a leader (with the feral kids), and leaders make tough,
utilitarian choices for the good of their own.
That scene
rather justifies a picture that had been losing its way during a rather generic
third act. There aren’t very many places a zombie movie can go, even one with
as distinctive a starting point (an insect pathogenising fungus that leaps the
species barrier) and characteristics (the jabbering, lunging jaws of the
infected are a persuasively unnerving conceit), since ultimately it usually
comes down to being chased, torn apart, infected and chased some more (if you
haven’t succumbed to during the first three elements).
While plot
and character are firmly in focus, this works fine, through the breach of the
complex and the flight to London, even as Melanie is let loose and returns not
because she has to but because she likes them (well, Helen and Fisayo Akinade’s
Private Gallagher). But there comes a point where characters are required to
absent themselves of common-sense for the sake of standard horror film tropes (or,
even worse, blundering; at one point Gallagher is sent to find food, and Parks
lets Melanie out – to find her own food – within minutes), and you’d rather
hoped by this point that McCarthy and Carey (adapting his novel) were above
such things. Characters go off alone, enter impossibly tight spaces and then
get set upon (and set upon again), having displayed (literally) military
precision and discipline earlier. It gets so that when Parks (Paddy Considine)
buys it, it’s little more than the writer finding a quick means to kill him off;
it’s that ungainly.
McCarthy
uses sound and imagery throughout to marvellously heightened effect, from the
unnerving chanting on the soundtrack (Christobal Tapia de Veer also memorably
scored Utopia) to the bewilderment of
Melanie experiencing the big, bright outdoors (the cinematography comes from McCarthy’s
Peaky Blinders lenser, Simon Dennis),
to her blissed-out reverie upon feeding.
The overgrown London is particularly
effective (apparently partially achieved with shots of a Ukranian town deserted
since Chernobyl), with readily identifiable shops, insignias and landmarks, and
a Day of the Triffids vibe to the
ominous seed pods (admittedly, this whole gambit, where a box of matches
effectively signals the end of homo sapiens, is a little cute/too neat). It’s easy to come away with the feeling that this desolated human landscape
has been justly reclaimed by the planet, well on its way to banishing all
traces of civilisation and replacing them with a blanket of greenery. And there
are welcome, odd touches, such as the zombie mother still pushing a pram while
all around are her immobile brethren (I have to admit to failing to understand
the scene of a hungry apparently feeding on his own limbs, however).
Considine,
Close and Arterton deserve due praise, but Nanua’s almost preternaturally
insightful and aware performance is the one to laud most; she’ll surely be at
the top of Hollywood casting lists by now. I’m less certain over what
McCarthy’s picture says about the current fate of the feline in movies. And I
don’t mean being voiced by Kevin Spacey. With this, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Inside
Llewyn Davis, the unfortunate demise of the moggy is a development you’d
rather hoped wouldn’t be catching on. Like those two pictures, though, an
eviscerated cat isn’t enough to diminish its positive points. The Girl with All the Gifts deserves to
stand out from the ongoing glut of zombie/hungry fare. There will be inevitable
comparisons to 28 Days Later, but
they shouldn’t extend further than that, in both cases, the pictures lose
something during the third act; this is thematically a far richer piece.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.
Comments
Post a comment