I had seen advertisements for the film The Girl With All the Gifts (2016), and after almost buying it at my local Walmart over the weekend, I found it for video on demand through internet streaming and decided to give it a viewing. I’m glad I did. It presents an interesting variation on the zombie film and can be understood almost like a hybrid of Night of the Living Dead meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The film takes place in a post-apocalyptic UK, where presumably the entire world has been overrun by “Hungries,” human beings who are under the control of a fungal infection that destroys their free will and gives them insatiable hunger for the living. The film focuses on children of the Hungries, in particular one girl named Melanie. These children have free will, for the most part, and may hold the key to the development of a vaccine that can save humanity. The Girl With All the Gifts, like the film Maggie, is a part of small number of zombie films that seek to explore aspects of humanity by rehumanizing the zombie monster.

The IMDB storyline summary and film trailer are below.

In a dystopian near future, humanity has been ravaged by a mysterious fungal disease. The afflicted are robbed of all free will and turned into flesh-eating ‘hungries’. Humankind’s only hope is a small group of hybrid children who crave human flesh but retain the ability to think and feel. The children go to school at an army base in rural Britain, where they’re subjected to cruel experiments by Dr. Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close). School teacher Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton) grows particularly close to an exceptional girl named Melanie (Sennia Nanua), thus forming a special bond. But when the base is invaded, the trio escape with the assistance of Sgt. Eddie Parks (Paddy Considine) and embark on a perilous journey of survival, during which Melanie must come to terms with who she is.