If you watch The Girl with All the Gifts without knowing anything of the story beforehand, the first few minutes you could easily assume that it was about children with superpowers being locked up by people afraid of them (like my dad did). In these first few minutes the movie made me cry twice. First at the sad life these innocent, friendly children lead and then at Melanie (Sennia Nanua), the protagonist, reading out a story she wrote, where a girl - it’s her obviously - saves a beautiful woman - the teacher (Gemma Arterton) - from a monster. It was so beautiful and sad and both the teacher and I cried.
(Quelle: https://www.flipthetruck.com/2017/02/09/the-girl-with-wll-the-gifts/)
Pretty soon, it becomes clear that the children aren’t superpowered but some form of zombies. A military man purposefully triggers the zombie in them to show the teacher that they are inhuman. The struggle between the deliberate dehumanization from the military people and the intrinsic humanity the children feel and exude is a theme of the movie. What is perceived as humanity itself is subject to change.
The teacher sees and treats Melanie as human from the start, even when she exhibits monstrous characteristics, and protects her from those that would harm her, for example, putting herself between her and guns. But even the military personel begin to regard her as a living being - if not fully human. The more time they spend with her in a destroyed and zombie-ridden London, after their base has been overrun, the more they treat her like a child. In the end the commander (Paddy Considine) even attempts to save her from zombies, knowing full well that they won’t hurt her.
In London they find a gaggle of children like her. They have created a small society, are able to make and use tools and weapons and employ trickery in their hunting. And while they do not speak human language - nobody to teach them - they do communicate with sounds and words that they use like their own language. They are mostly feral, primed for survival, but clearly capable of emotions.
There’s a doctor with the group (Glenn Close) who insists that it would be possible for her to develop a vaccine that might cure the zombie-infection. To do this, however, she would have to kill Melanie. Back at the base, she had already experimented on the brains and spinal cords of the children which is presumably the purpose for which they kept them in the first place. The teacher is vehemently against the idea from the beginning, even threatening the doctor. The doctor sees her objection against killing the children as a failure on her part to internalize that the children aren’t human. Later, it becomes clear that the doctor does consider the children to be people, she just considers the possibility of a vaccination to be more important than the life of a single being. The commander on the other hand questions the procedure as soon as he begins to consider Melanie a person. To reach her goal anyway, the doctor drugs them and attempts to kill Melanie. When she wakes up early, however, the doctor tries to convince her that her sacrifice is necessary.
Melanie almost seems swayed. But she has a last question for the doctor. “Do you consider us to be people?” (Or something like that, I watched the movie in German.) The doctor confirms that, yes, she does think that the half-zombie children are people. Melanie has struggled with her own humanity the whole movie. She has moments where she sees herself as the monster from the story and denies herself the humanity that has been withheld from her all her life. The doctor’s confirmation that she is a person and the other children are too, triggers the end of the movie.
The end of the movie also being the end of the human race (at least in the greater London area). Melanie sets the plants, that spread the zombie-infection, on fire, causing the seeds to open and everyone who breathes the pollen in to turn into a zombie. It kills the commander who left the safety of the lab to save Melanie and the doctor who left the lab to stop her. The teacher survives in the lab and spends her days teaching the feral half-zombie children and the ones from the base that Melanie presumably rescued.
(Quelle: https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-girl-with-all-the-gifts-racebending-means-so-much-m-1792786423)
Well, that’s unexpected.
Zombie movies (of the apocalyptic variety) tend to end on a more hopeful note, with some form of vaccine or cure or at the very least, the protagonists in a safe place. But is this ending really that hopeless? That depends if you consider the half-zombie children to be people or not. I’d argue that it is in fact a happy ending.
While the seeds of the plans that spanned some of London’s skyscrapers were robust, one day they would’ve opened anyway. Furthermore, the movie suggests that the zombies are in the process of overrunning the remaining military bases. Not only the one the protagonists came from but also the bigger one they thought would be their safe haven. Even if the doctor would have been able to make a vaccine - something which is put into question by the fact that apparently she has been saying that she’s just short of creating a vaccine for a while - there would have been no way to distribute it and the zombies still would have been around. In the ending Melanie creates, the half-zombie children get to learn and grow up and - as it is implied - built a new small society, sure in their inherent humanity.
Also, it’s a fun reversal that in the end the teacher is the one who’s locked up.
Now, it’s not a new idea to present zombies as something other than mindless eating-machines. Warm Bodies featured a zombie protagonist and eventually a zombie/human love story that ended with the cure to the zombie-virus being love. It sounds incredibly kitschy - and it is - but the movie has some original ideas and funny moments. Horror themed children’s cartoons regularly present zombies as just another form of supernatural creature. The Girl with All the Gifts, however, is different in the way it actively questions what it means to be human and if there is a line between human and ‘monster’ and how blurry that line can get.
The movie surprised me and I enjoyed it a lot. Maybe because its themes of otherness and discussions of humanity are some of my favorites.
Satori over and out
(Oh, by the way, not related at all to the discussion at all, but I’ll be damned if I don’t mention it: the sound design in this movie was atrocious to me. The discordant noises and background music were too loud and overpowering and instead of setting me on edge or providing an atmosphere, they just made me wish they would stop.)
(Also not really related to the discussion: I love that the zombies are in stand-by mode when they’re not actively hunting food. On the one hand it makes sense for them to conserve the little energy they have and not waste it on shambling around unnecessarily, on the other hand it’s also such a funny picture to see them just standing there softly swaying and not doing anything.)
(Explaining zombie-virus as a fungal infection is pretty cool as well.)
