The Girl with All The Gifts (2016)

To be up-front, this is not a movie review that you read to see whether you want to watch a movie or not unless you are one of those wrong-people who actually enjoys knowing the end of a movie and in fact requires it. Not that I don’t have other things to say about the rest of the movie but I have so many questions, and theories and philsophical wankings to blurt out about the end that I need to warn you now that if you are looking for a demure and vague discussion of things that are not the plot, then you need to go elsewhere.

Things that are not spoilers…Glenn Close is good in this movie, so are Paddy Considine and Gemma Arterton. They get given characters with precious little exposition to them whose stories they get to create. Sennia Nanua is just brilliant. She tows what has to be such a complex line to hold. It would have been so easy to play it cute and childlike the whole time so the fierce moments seemed extraordinarily far-fetched. It would have been so easy to let it fall into the caricature of the not even remotely plausibly innocent creepy child that seems to pop up all over the place as a cheap quick scare. She somehow is believable both as such an innocent that it’s a shame she’s been caught up in all this, and as a bloodthirsty creature whose cuter traits are even scarier for the ability to stare at a cat adoption poster with blood smeared all over her face, still hungry.

The set work and CGI that turn London into a post-civilization emerald wonderland are catnip for me. I could watch movies about empty cities all day, and had it been dreck, I would have still been there for the empty black windows of the double-decker buses and vine-encrusted red phone booths. Plus the soundtrack was rather 28 Days Later-ish at times, and definitely there for that combo too.

I also like how the movie didn’t treat you like you were stupid, one major aspect of Melanie’s behavior was evident but never explained, and I love that kind of elegant assumption of an intelligent viewer. Neither did it get off on opaqueness for opaqueness’s sake, not leaving major aspects unexplained to feign mystery instead of half-hearted attention to plot-holes. So rare to see that now that studios seem to be terrified people will stop watching your science fiction movie if there’s not a prologue holding their hand into what world they’re entering, or think that incompleteness is a synonym for deepness. So thank you for treating me like an engaged participant in the storytelling, Girl with All the Gifts.

Tone-switch. Spoilers in 5

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Okay, nerds who have seen the end of the movie and those mutants who find no joy in suspense, it just us now here in this deserted alley where we hear whispers and clanks? Gravy.

This is maybe one of the best horror story endings I’ve come across since reading I Am Legend. Just the complete up-ending of who you think the goodies and the baddies are, which I guess in its own way is quite a horrifying situation without mass-murder by fungus. I mean, if our current backlash and backlash to backlash and backlash to backlash to backlash cycle of cultural criticism is any indication, we’re terrified of admitting the automatic assumption that our scale for who is respectable has never been based on anything real. Which I’m sure is part of the point of both of the endings. One of those rare occasions when the ending containing the point behind the story that you should have been able to see all along doesn’t feel heavy-handed and mwahahaha gotcha, but totally earned and impactful.

“So why should we have to die and you get to live?” Spoken by a young girl of color to an older white woman who’s trying to get her to make a sacrifice, those optics cannot have been accidental. Although frankly I doubt that she was really as able to make that immediate vaccine as much as she claimed. I don’t think you whip up a cocktail that turns walking piles of fungus that were feeding only off dwindling small animal stock for a decade to into normal humans based on an hours-long analysis of another fungus-human hybrid’s brain. Assuming that she was actually telling the truth and didn’t just think she was, was Melanie’s answer really that monstrous? I don’t think the movie thinks so. I don’t think this is a Twilight Zone, “isn’t it all so unfortunate how we’re utterly screwed?” type ending.

It has hit me perhaps a bit harder since I’ve recently re-read Lilith’s Brood which also has atypical views of generational/interspecies struggle, and am in the midst of The Power which I can only assume will have a similarly bleak view in the end of an overly simplistic way of looking at how to fix problems by having an unyielding certainty of the heroes and villains of a piece.

Just like in Lilith’s Brood, Melanie’s new way is inarguably monstrous compared to the old, but it is strongly pointed out that of course from a position of knowing only one flawed world that was our own, any other way that dispenses so utterly of it will seem horrifying.

But when the old way isn’t just ill, isn’t just dying, but is basically just artificially and precariously this side of dead, can it be argued that there’s a reason to go back to it, instead of plunging into the new? I don’t know which the movie believes to be honest. Even Melanie seems perfectly able to condemn an unseen country, if not world, to death but tries to pretend she won’t sacrifice the people with her. In a way, she is still trying to placate the morals of the old world and uphold the worth of some of the inhabitants. Does that mean she thinks the way people were has value but is upending them anyway because she can and must for her own survival.

Is it being said that she and her hybrid creatures win out because they are just better adapted by possessing the strengths of both worlds, intelligence and ruthless resilience? Or is it being said that instead of them winning by their own merits, it is the other side that has failed and lost and just refuses to see the cane crooked in the wings to haul them off with no encore.

I really don’t know which it is. And I really really love that it might be all of them or none of them, or something that will occur to me tomorrow in the shower.

This flick is on Amazon Prime. Lady Picture Show recommends having a companion with you so you can have a good old fashioned philosophical bull session about it afterwards.