The Girl with All the Gifts (2016)

The Girl with All the Gifts arrives from 2016, a British post-apocalyptic picture in which a fungal infection has converted most of humanity into fast, mindless hungries, and a small band of survivors escorts a remarkable child named Melanie across a ruined England. Melanie is played by Sennia Nanua, a young Black actress who carries the film on her shoulders, and the movie never once stops to announce this fact. That is the quiet distinction here. The casting is diverse in a way that feels like a decision made at the audition table and then sensibly left alone, which is its own modest virtue in an age that prefers to explain itself.

The adults around her are a scientist, a teacher, and a sergeant, and the women are given real work to do: one wants to dissect the girl for a vaccine, the other wants to protect her. Neither is reduced to a type, and neither arrives bearing a thesis about gender. The film quietly reverses the usual arrangement, letting the hybrid child inherit the earth while the white grown-ups fail, expire, or ask to be shot in the head. It never names this reversal. It never lectures about it. The result is a movie that could be mistaken for apolitical, which is not the same as being empty.

Where the film does raise its voice, it is only to explain the fungus. Dr. Caldwell delivers her exposition about pods and spores and symbiotic relationships with the patience of a museum docent, and the audience is expected to keep up. The dread does the moral work instead. There is no sermon about the climate, no indictment of capital, no lesson about bodies or brains. Just a girl, a bat, and a burning tower. We have classified it. It sits, comfortably, near the temperate middle.