It was on my Amazon Prime watchlist (it’s free with AP, btw) for a couple of months because it sounded like an interesting take on zombies. I didn’t know of the film (or the book, as it turns out) before I saw the listing and I knew nothing other than what was written in the listing:
I was utterly blown away. And now can’t stop thinking about it.
Each act is better than the previous one, and it starts off strong.
A little bit of exposition but not much. And the ham-fisted foreshadowing never materialized; I loved that.
The ending was PHENOMENAL.
IMO it’s right up there with Dog Day Afternoon or Once Upon a Time in America for both content and ending. ETA: And the anti-hero aspect; that part is freaking incredibly well done.
The performances are uniformly fantastic. Glenn Close is still great but Sennia Nanua eclipses her and everyone else in one of the most incredible performances by a child in recent memory. I was right there with Sgt. Parks when he said “Pretend?”
The film isn’t perfect. I hate HATE hate “let’s split up” in horror/suspense movies and this had a couple of those moments. I forgive them only because they move the story long and, let’s face it, I pretty much knew that it was gonna happen at least once because what horror/suspense movie doesn’t have it happen?
After I watched it I went and read about it (that’s how I discovered that it was also a book). It turns out that director Colm McCarthy made this for only £4M (that’s a little over $5.1M)! I have no idea how he secured Glenn Close with such paltry funds, but clearly the man knows how to do a lot with very little funding.
Okay, I’m basically just typing off the top of my head, trying to get down in text some of what’s been going thru my head for the past 2 days. Anyone else seen this movie?
Saw it when it showed up on Amazon Streaming a few months after I read the book. Highly recommend both the book and the movie. I’m sleepy and heading to bed, otherwise I’d say more, but overall, if anyone is at all interested in this kind of genre, you won’t be disappointed.
Huh. I read the book and enjoyed it ( I’m a minor fan of author Mike Carey, both his novels and his comics writing ). No idea it had been made into a film - slipped under my radar. Thanks for the heads up :).
I liked it a lot. It’s a mix of zombie flick (with the usual zombie tropes) and sci-fi (with the fungus and spores and the ‘evolution’ of the children).
The performances are all very good–especially Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton, and the actress who played the eponymous ‘girl’ (don’t know her name OTTOMH).
Though I will say there was one scene that took me out of the story a bit. I think it could have been edited better or shot differently or something. It was when the girl, Melanie, was first taking control of the mob of zombie kids, going around the circle and displaying dominance. Just felt very hokey.
I didn’t know it was a movie, but I read the book, it was excellent. In books you don’t have visuals, only your imagination and in this book the girl is the narrator. I didn’t get right away that she was a zombie, she just said she had a “disease”. (Maybe I’m slow?)
Nice twists in this book and the ending did blow me away.
I watched it on the plane a couple of months ago. I really liked some aspects of it, and think it was a very brave story with more integrity than most, but I can’t exactly say I liked it overall. I think that might be partly because the ending for the teacher is far more nightmarish than the cheerful way it’s portrayed. I would recommend watching it unless you were feeling very down already, though.
I thought the book was great. I saw the movie and was disappointed. I couldn’t recommend the movie because it was so disjointed and lacking in depth, but the book I can whole heartedly recommend.
Good movie that basically follows the book. Wonder why there was absolutely no advertising for this movie. I mean, it stars Glenn Close and the book was pretty popular, and I had no idea that this movie was even made before it happened to show up in my itunes recommendations.
I watched the movie finally, and thought they dumbed-down the Hungry kids’ intelligence. As I recall, although Melanie was the smartest, they all did well in classroom work, as you’d expect the next evolutionary leap to do.
My recollection of the book was that Miss Justineau basically considered giving the rest of her life to the children a form of penance, for being complicit in their vivisections.
I dunno. The first classroom scene had all of them as pretty freakishly smart. The feral Hungries were smart and developing a social structure from complete scratch.
Yes in the book Miss Justineau saw it that way, her just penance. The movie to me implies that Melanie was motivated by her selfish desire for Miss Justineau to be her teacher forever, which she achieved at the cost of humanity. The line added from Close’s doctor character that Melanie was what was in Pandora’s box and the implication being that she and Miss Justineau somehow released it upon humanity frames the ending as Miss Justineau now being condemned to live with the consequences of it. Melanie’s motivations were clearly otherwise in the book and more selfless. She concluded that the alternative was only a suffering-filled prolongation of the inevitable for all and releasing the spores was in the broader sense the better alternative.
I however accept that a movie adaptation requires not only cutting aspects out but changing aspects to fit the form. It was fine. Works like a Twilight Zone or Black Mirror ep works more than how the book works is all.
In the movie, in the classroom scene, most of the Hungry kids had problems with the periodic table. And the creative writing exercise showed they didn’t have much imagination (although they didn’t have much stimulus for imagination down in the hole). That was about all we saw. In the book, they were doing calculus, IIRC.
Although yes, the Hungry pack on the outside had developed a society and language. They were far more advanced than you’d think.
Loved the book, loved the movie. I’ll probably watch it again in a couple of weeks. Agree that the girl actress was perfect. I didn’t mind the differences between the book and the movie.
Bumping since I just watched the movie last night and enjoyed it.
I had a few questions that I couldn’t quite figure out.
How did the feral zombie kids survive infancy? Even if they develop teeth earlier and eat their way out, what then? Are they like little baby deer, able to walk hours after birth?
The fact that the main character is ~8-10 years old means that the fungal zombie plague has been going on that long at least, but the fact that the humans are worried about the fruiting body means that that’s a new development, and presumably also that the problem is localized. Couldn’t quite put all that together.
Sweet! I was just thinking about this movie the other day; I’ll use this as an excuse to watch it again.
I got the impression that the kids didn’t survive on blood alone, only that they had a need for it and that the plague provided them with speed and violence and viciousness so that the need could be satisfied (from an evolutionary standpoint, I guess?). Most of the time they were more or less normal, unless they caught the scent of blood.
Are you talking about the Doc’s line that the spores exploding would wipe out everyone everywhere? I took that to mean that this would hasten the inevitability of things, that this would effectively cancel any chance of anyone avoiding infection, no matter where on the planet they were.
But hey, it was a great movie, so I’ll watch it again and see if I think differently then.
I didn’t come away with a similar impression as the bolded part.
I thought Melanie’s motivation to release the spores was just as described but he dialogue: a simple choice of me vs. you, wonderfully depicted; I actually cheered at her decision.
And I thought her keeping Miss Justineau was yes, both because she liked her and because she appreciated the contributions to her own continued survival. And because Melanie knew that she and others like herself were going to need a teacher, need someone who could explain at least some of the thousands of years of history, societies and technologies that humans had developed before they were lost. No point in starting a new civilization any closer to Zero than one has to, eh.