The post-apocalyptic zombie/ infected movie canon is overcrowded, but somehow people keep finding new ways to keep the genre undead. Colm McCarthy’s The Girl with All the Gifts is no exception. It is as memorable as it is original, setting itself apart from other zombie films in both tone and focus.

The Girl with All the Gifts is about Melanie, a rage-infected girl whose body could potentially help create a vaccine that saves what is left of humanity. But there is a catch. Melanie is a hybrid of human and infected. She is intelligent and, if restrained, friendly. To dissect her to create a potential vaccine would essentially kill her. It would be committing murder, but to what degree depends on how much you feel Melanie is a person.

At the start of the The Girl with All the Gifts, it is made clear that Melanie has been held captive in a research facility for a long time, perhaps her whole life, and though the humans on the base have been trained not to, it is clear Melanie’s exceptional personality has made her the favourite out of all the child-hybrids.

And then the “hungries” show up.

One thing that sets The Girl with All the Gifts apart from other films in this genre is that it feels more like a dramatic-science-fiction film than an action-horror or a horror-comedy. The inclusion of infected-hybrids gives the story an original ethical quandary for the character’s to wrestle with. At its core The Girl with All the Gifts, like all zombie/infected stories, is essentially a tale of survival, but the uncertainty around what to do with Melanie gives the story more depth than zombie movies generally typically to deliver.

The characters in The Girl with All the Gifts are also much less cliché than in most films of its kind. In most zombie films, we grow accustomed to seeing common character-types like the generally good person who tries to hide his or her spreading infection from the group or the uber-survivalist whose uncaring behaviour proves more dangerous than a horde of undead. But in The Girl with All the Gifts characters have believable, unselfish motivations behind their actions. People disagree, but these disagreements are not excuses to recklessly put others at risk simply to push the plot forward. Every character offers a valid point of view and the characters’ positions evolve in a realistic way as events unfold. I often had a hard time deciding whose opinion I thought was best and as a viewer, I frequently found myself changing my allegiances.

But for a film like this to work, the audience needs to feel some degree of empathy for Melanie, who is played by the surprising charismatic Sennia Nanua. The casting Nanua, who came to the roll with few prior credentials, as the young lead was an inspired choice by McCarthy. Nanua she has a quality about her that makes you believe she’s special. She, like her character, stands out. This makes it easy to root for her character, even though she possesses a similar potential for danger as Eli from in Let the Right One In. 

But the most impressive part of The Girl with All the Gifts is in its ability to make survivalist zombie/ infected film thought-provoking. Long after watching the film, I found myself better appreciating some of the film’s subtleties and what they revealed about the characters. I just hope that in the years to come, the people (like me) who make lists still remember this film as one of the better entries in an overstuffed a genre that consistently produces outliers that exceed expectations.