Have a Daily Scream for your daily-streaming recommendation for spooky season! (Explore last year’s Daily Scream films.)
If you don’t already know to which brand of science-fiction horror 2016’s The Girl with All the Gifts belongs, try to avoid finding out before you dig in. For one of the great, if disturbing, pleasures of this uniquely unsettling movie is in not being able to anticipate anything about where it’s going or what it wants you to feel along the way. It rings bells that resound of everything from 28 Days Later to Day of the Triffids to Lord of the Flies and beyond, but it also stakes out its own place in a subgenre that rarely inspires much freshness.
This subgenre is one that dehumanizes human beings — sometimes to offer commentary on the current state of our culture, more often merely to excuse its own brutality — and Girl rehumanizes it ways that are both extraordinarily moving and deeply unnerving. This is one of the most humane works of speculative fiction I’ve come across on film. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to make a deliberate attempt to broaden the idea of what “human” and “humane” mean, and in ways that may be very, very uncomfortable.
US: rent/buy at Prime and Apple TV
UK: rent/buy at Prime and Apple TV
See The Girl with All the Gifts at Letterboxd for more viewing options, including in all other global regions.
