M.R. Carey’s celebrated genre novel “The Girl With All the Gifts” is one of the few novels-turned-films included in the Midnight Madness program (Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Rats is the other). This is important to note because Carey is also the film’s screenwriter and many of the book’s deficiencies unfortunately carry over into his script.

Veteran British TV director Colm McCarthy makes his feature debut with this slightly subverted tale of a zombie infestation that has overridden the UK. The main character and our conduit into the film is Melanie (newcomer Sennia Nanua, making a strong impression). The opening scene effectively sets the stage: the flicker of lights announce the start of a new day in a dark cell of what we soon learn is an underground military bunker. As orders are barked outside her door, Melanie hides a few pictures beneath her pillow; moments later the door bursts open and her head, hands and feet are secured to a wheelchair by soldiers toting guns. Their actions are deliberately cautious and they are extremely agitated, particularly when they get too close to her.

As far as opening sequences go, The Girl With All the Gifts firmly checks all of the boxes. There’s a sense of mystery to the proceedings: why is Melanie locked up? Why are the soldiers so scared? Why are the safety precautions so severe for a child? As the pace picks up and McCarthy tracks Melanie’s wheelchair along the corridor, we see other children afforded the same treatment, then parked in formation for a school lesson administered in a way that resembles a cruel boarding school. What is going on here?!

It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Melanie is a “hungry”, the derogatory term used by the soldiers for the hordes of zombies just outside the compound walls. But Melanie and the approximately twenty other children aren’t like the creatures on the other side of the fence – those are feral creatures in varying states of decomposition who appear to have no higher brain function. Melanie stands firmly in opposition to this: her inquisitive nature and sunny disposition is one of the film’s most charming characteristics (her fondness for peppering the adults with exasperating questions is nice a recurring joke). Melanie acts completely normal, and she’s more than happy to answer questions in class , particularly if it earns her a smile from the beautiful Miss Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton), the only adult who treats her like a real girl.

[Related] All Toronto International Film Festival coverage on Bloody Disgusting

We’re barely ten minutes into the film when we learn that despite the lessons, the children are only being kept alive as test subjects for Dr. Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close). The doctor is an icy intellect; her interactions with Melanie are all tests designed to analyze the girl’s responses and an early scene is shockingly candid about Caldwell’s willingness to brandish a scalpel if it brings humanity closer to a cure.

The opening act of the film hums along nicely, establishing questions and answering them quickly and efficiently, establishing both the characters and the new world order in measured paces. Things run predictably amok rather quickly and within the first half hour a brutal zombie attack forces Justineau, Caldwell and Melanie to abandon the compound with a group of soldiers led by angry Sgt. Parks (Paddy Considine). From here The Girl With All the Gifts moves into fairly traditional zombie film territory as the group seeks safe passage through London and stretches of dialogue-heavy character and world building are punctuated by zombie attack set-pieces designed to winnow down the ranks. Treading familiar ground is both a strength and a weakness of the film. One exciting sequence finds the group trying to navigate their way on foot through a pack of hungries who have gone into hibernation. Watching the small band cautiously move through a mass of hundreds of creatures, knowing that at any moment an attack can (and will) begin is tremendous fun, even if this is a scene that we’ve seen a million times.

Unfortunately The Girl With All the Gifts fails to do enough to distinguish itself from countless other flesh-eating films. The only true distinctive element is Melanie, a child-like contemporary update of Day of the Dead’s Bub, whose status as both zombie and human allows her to pass in both groups. As the film progresses, this skill becomes increasingly instrumental to the group’s survivals and earns her the begrudging respect of the soldiers, though not Dr. Caldwell. Close does what she can to ensure that the doctor is more than a simple caricature antagonist for Melanie (overall the acting is uniformly good – unsurprising given the pedigree of the cast). Caldwell’s insistence of her medical prowess reinforces the fact that Melanie is ultimately just a parasite wearing a child’s visage, a point contrasted by Justineau’s insistence that Melanie is simply a girl. What Carey’s screenplay doesn’t seem to realize is that the good mother/bad mother, nature vs nurture dichotomy isn’t really necessary; throughout the film we are repeatedly shown Melanie’s monstrous side when she eats humans and (more affectingly) a cat, just as we see the way she reacts to Justineau as a child reacts with love for their mother.

This issue, as well as the overall familiarity of so much of the narrative, were issues in the novel as well. The somewhat unique zombie mythos and compelling action sequences (staged effectively by McCarthy and thankfully not edited within an inch of their life) are definitely pros. Ultimately Carey’s inability to free himself of the predictability of his source novel drags down The Girl With All the Gifts’ potential. Chalk this up as competent, but unspectacular.