Glenn Close Starred In An Acclaimed Sci-Fi Horror Movie That's Streaming For Free

If you've been a horror fan long enough, zombie films can easily feel ubiquitous since their frequent resurgence seems never-ending. The subgenre has become so diluted over the past few decades that it really takes a unique approach to make a movie that doesn't feel like a dime-a-dozen offering in the sea of dystopian narratives replete with mindless undead monsters hungry for human flesh. Occasionally, there are great examples like HBO's "The Last of Us" series or the 2017 Japanese horror comedy "One Cut of the Dead" that reinvigorate the genre to some degree. Yet, since the land of zombie flicks is so overpopulated, it's easy to miss smaller-scale gems like Colm McCarthy's 2016 "The Girl With All the Gifts" — now streaming for free on Tubi and Pluto TV.

U.K. filmmakers often approach this subject differently — see Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" films — compared to their American contemporaries, and McCarthy's feature is no exception. While as much a zombie movie as any other, his picture focuses on kids who were infected in the womb, retaining both their human selves and the vicious creatures they become around normal people when their hunger takes over. 

Based on Mike Carey's novel of the same name, "The Girl With All the Gifts" takes place in the near future at an army base after an infection has eviscerated most of humanity (turning them into animalistic monsters called "the hungries"). Here, we see a group of imprisoned children observed and experimented on by scientists (led by Glenn Close's Dr. Caldwell) and educators (like Gemma Arterton's empathetic Ms. Justineau) in hopes of getting closer to a cure. Melanie (Sennia Nanua) is the brightest of them all, and when the base is swarmed by the hungries, she becomes the last hope for a small group of survivors.

Right from the start, McCarthy establishes an unnerving, threatening atmosphere filled with dread and tension. All we see is a bunch of tweens dehumanized, treated barbarically as if they were notorious murderers or vicious animals. It's extremely off-putting and uncomfortable to witness this treatment by soldiers since the kids couldn't be sweeter and more polite, especially Melanie, who acts like a well-behaved student in school. But this is the point: Once they smell human fluids, their innocent and cute faces quickly contort into feral abominations ready to devour any person standing before them. They can't help their nature, and all the precautions — the cages, the straps, the modified wheelchairs — are vital and necessary for safety around them. It's this balancing act between cruelty and humanity where "The Girl With All the Gifts" excels, navigating a narrow path of morality in a world that has very little left in it.

But since this is a rather traditionally structured zombie film, once the outbreak happens, survival mode kicks in, bringing along all the mandatory (if typical) action sequences one can expect. And while they're decent enough to maintain a healthy suspense that engages us throughout till the end, they're also riddled with genre trappings that weaken the picture. Questionable character decisions, narrative inconsistencies, and all-too-familiar practical effects begin to occur more frequently up to a point where you start to suspect this flick isn't that different from your average zombie fare. Yet McCarthy and Carey pull an ace from their sleeve in the final stretch to drive home a point that eventually succeeds in differentiating "The Girl With All the Gifts" from most zombie horrors. Whether you click with it or not, it's a choice that lands, given everything that preceded it.

Once it started screening at film festivals and opening theatrically in the U.K., "The Girl With All the Gifts" was an instant success among critics. As of this writing, it has a whopping 86% score on Rotten Tomatoes (alongside a less favorable 67% audience rating). But given that McCarthy's feature only received a limited theatrical release on U.S. soil after opening more widely in the U.K. and Europe, its box office performance was far from being a successful run. Against its estimated £4 million budget (approximately $5.35 million in U.S. dollars), the film only managed to scrape together $4.08 million worldwide, unable to even earn back its production cost. However, once it became available on home video, it spread like wildfire among horror aficionados, gaining a much larger viewer base than it initially did in cinemas.

Although it turned out to be more polarizing among regular viewers than critics, it's certainly a zombie film that earned its rather positive reputation in horror movie circles. If you're an avid fan of the undead and didn't catch it a decade ago, there couldn't be a better time to cover that blind spot and tune in, especially now that you can do it free of charge (in the U.S.).