It's a quantum leap from McCarthy’s flawed but intriguing 2010 debut feature OutcastWe open in disorienting fashion as a young girl in a prison cell settles herself into a manacled wheelchair, awaiting the arrival of armed guards. There’s a Cronenbergian edge to the film’s ambivalent attitude towards infection, encapsulated in Nanua’s nuanced performance that shifts between youthful innocence, feral survivalism and opiate-like addiction. Scenes of Melanie in a Hannibal Lecter-style mask strapped to the roof of a military vehicle combine horror and pathos with absurdist aplomb. A startling vision of London’s BT Tower overgrown by colossal foliage is just one of several production design coups that evoke a world Ray Bradbury might have recognised. A quantum leap from McCarthy’s flawed but intriguing 2010 debut feature Outcast (with which this shares some thematic concerns), The Girl With All the Gifts is exactly the kind of genre picture the UK should be making: provocative, imaginative and unafraid to sink its teeth into complex and challenging material.

Source: The Guardian September 25, 2016 07:52 UTC