12 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: The Girl With All The Gifts (2016)

It's not very often that I get to review something before it has a full on theatrical run, or worse, before it's already on home video markets.  Often when I go to the movies these days I'm not even going to newer films.  I'm usually watching retrospectives of the great directors I admire instead.  However, on the closing night of Beyond Fest at the Egyptian Theatre I finally got to treat myself to something new and it may be the greatest "neo-zombie" film to date.  I'm talking, of course, about Colm Macarthy's The Girl With All The Gifts.

Adapted from the novel by the author, Mike Carey (who also wrote the screenplay), the film is set in a post apocalyptic England.  The girl in question, is Melanie (new comer Sennia Nanua) a precocious child who is strapped, arms, feet, and head into wheelchair every day by English soldiers and put through an education with a number of others like her.  She is eager to learn and has a fondness and bond towards her teacher, Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton), but for all her innocence she is still, technically, a monster.  When the base in which she lives is overtaken by "Hungry's" she escapes with Justineau and a small team of survivors including Sgt. Eddie Parks (Paddy Considine) and Dr. Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close) into a ravaged London to reconnect with other survivors.

What makes The Girl With All The Gifts so remarkable is that, in essence, it is a story about survival but it nuances and blurs the lines between right and wrong.  It's a zombie film that, like any truly great zombie film, doesn't focus on the what or the why, but what it means to survive and what it means to be human.  Girl takes it a step forward by questions the latter even more directly and it also has an unapologetic answer to the seeming death of mankind as it was, but you'll have to see it for yourself to get that answer.  Sennia Nanua is a breath of fresh air as Melanie and she both embraces and emboldens the coming of age aspects of the story to perfection.

Another lovely aspect of the film was the amount of production design that went into it.  While some of the larger scenes do rely somewhat heavily on CGI (to show the scope of the post-infection London) there are a number of gorgeously designed set pieces as well that give the film that full dimensional feeling often lost in large CGI spectacles.  Beautiful and suspenseful camera work keeps the audience on edge often, a few scenes eliciting vocal responses as the screening I went to, often times putting even the most intense moments of The Walking Dead to shame.  The rest of the cast are fully fleshed out dynamic characters, which speaks volumes to the writing.  It's not often in horror that you get to see subtle changes or growth, especially in modern horror, but that's the cornerstone of this film and it does it to perfection.  While you can probably see it on V.O.D. soon, I highly recommend going to the theatre for this one.  The sheer scope of the film is just gorgeous on the big screen!

01 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: The Voices (2014)

It's that time of year again, when Netflix and HuluPlus are overflowing with Horror movies, most of which I've never seen.  In 2014 I undertook a personal challenge to watch 31 films (one for each day) and it yielded a couple of interesting evenings (including one where I had to watch 4 films in one night just to catch up) as well as some downright awful bloody films.  But that's okay, they can't all be screamers.  To cut to the chase, I'm doing it again and in my own whimsical way of randomly selecting titles I started off with Marjane Satrapi's The Voices.

Set in rural Milton (anywhere USA), it follows Jerry (Ryan Reynolds), an upbeat man who works at a bathtub factory where all the workers wear these hot pink colored jump suits.  From the start there is an odd juxtaposition of the rural decay with pop color splashes and styles, suggesting that things are not quite as they appear.  Sure enough, they are not.  Jerry hears voices.  Well, more specifically, he talks to his cat and dog who take on a sort of demon and angel roles of Jerry's fragile mental capacity.  After a night gone wrong, things quickly escalate out of hand as Jerry finds himself in a constant moral battle with his own mind.

The film has an excellent visual punctuation of color cues (which should come as no surprise from the creator of Persepolis), usually Pink, that tip off the audience subtlety to the inconsistencies of Jerry's mind.  The world as Jerry see's it, is much brighter and optimistic, than when other characters are present.  Jerry's own apartment, immaculately clean and tidy, becomes a disheveled hoarder mess when other characters enter the space, and even when Jerry attempts to quell the voices with medication.  The attention paid to these details really makes the film as engaging of an experience as it is.  Throw in some mega doses of dark comedy and a seriously excellent performance from Reynolds and you have one hell of an enjoyable film.

While Reynolds performance is the central focus of the film, Gemma Arterton, Anna Kendrick, and Jacki Weaver are all perfectly cast as three central female presences in Jerry's life.  Arterton's queen bee manipulative user, to Kendrick's sweet innocence, and Weaver's professional obliviousness make for 3 complex dynamic relationships to Reynolds slowly unraveling Jerry.  It's not hard to figure out what's going to happen to who, but the actors are all in such a fine element that it stirs a strong reaction in the audience regardless.  Reynolds not only stretched his acting chops physically, but orally as well, taking on all 4 of the voices that assault Jerry throughout the film.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film and found it a pleasing start to this month of Horror.  It's only downside is that it clearly suffers at times from the indie film lack of background characters.  A small gripe, but one that may take others out of the experience.  Check it out on HuluPlus, or Amazon Prime!