Paddy Considine, Glenn Close and a battle-ready Gemma Arterton spearhead humanity’s last-ditch push for survival in our first look at Colm McCarthy’s (Peaky Blinders) apocalyptic thriller, The Girl With All the Gifts.
Based on M.R. Carey’s novel of the same name, McCarthy’s feature imagines a world brought to its knees by a seemingly unstoppable pathogen. Rather than your typical rabies-like zombie outbreak, Arterton and Co. are left fending off Ophiocordyceps unilateralis – a mutated strain of the Cordyceps virus featured in Naughty Dog’s acclaimed video game, The Last of Us.
Headlining the feature is Arterton’s kick-ass teacher Miss Justineau who, alongside Paddy Considine’s Sergeant Parks batten down the hatches in Birmingham, as the handful of survivors scramble for a cure. Striking a bond with a young student called Melanie, it is Justineau’s protege that holds the title of The Girl With All The Gifts, and they’ll bloody well need her if they are to survive.
One beacon of hope amidst the devastation is Close’s “cold-eyed” scientist Dr. Caldwell, who dabbles with various means of locating a way to prevent the spread of the outbreak. But at what cost? Here’s the logline:
What’s left of the British population, now hunkered down in Birmingham, tries to find a cure from a single, intriguing anomaly: a group of children who have developed into a hybridised half-human, half-zombie state. The cold-eyed Dr. Caldwell experiments on them to find a cure for the pathogen.
Production on McCarthy’s drama wrapped last may, and UK moviegoers can lay eyes on The Girl With All the Gifts when it hits theaters on September 9. We’ll keep you posted if and when a US release date is disclosed.
