Bird Box

Dir: Susanne Bier

2018

****

It is unfortunate that Bird Box came to Netflix the best part of a year after the hugely popular The Quiet Place but in my opinion they’re both great films on par with each other. It should also be said that author Josh Malerman, whose 2013 novel the film is based on, had written a rough draft of the story before similar post-apocalyptic film The Road and The Happening were released. All that said, Bird Box is a unique post-apocalyptic thriller that stands on its own two feet. It has been criticised largely for its ambiguity, which is ridiculous as this is one of its key strengths. I do worry about younger viewers these days as the same thing happened to Annihilation earlier on in 2018. It went straight to Netflix so people assumed it wasn’t good enough for the cinema which was far from the truth. I’ve seen it featured heavily in people’s favourite films of the year lists and audiences made clear that a film should only be judged by its own merits and not the format in which it is released. Bird Box is suffering the same judgement, quite unfairly. The story is told in two halves, both joining at the end. It begins with a rather stern Sandra Bullock telling two young children to do exactly what they are told they will be going on a dangerous journey down a river. They are instructed to not remove their blindfolds or else they will die. It’s a startling introduction that reels you in immediately. The story then rewinds to five years previous, before whatever happened, happened. Bullock’s character Malorie is talking to sister Jessica (Sarah Paulson) when they hear a strange news story regarding mass suicides throughout Europe. After visiting their doctor (Parminder Nagra – who seems to only play doctors these days?), following Malorie's pregnancy checkup, they see a woman committing suicide when she bangs her head into a glass panel. As panic and chaos erupt in the city, the duo flee in order to get to safety. As Malorie looks away for a second Jessica suddenly sees something that changes her persona immediately. She turns to her sister with great sadness and intentionally crashes the car, turning it upside down. An injured Malorie is horrified when Jessica then gets out without helping her sister and steps in front of a large truck, killing herself instantly. As Malorie walks around in a daze, being pushed by people running in panic down the street she is saved by a woman who tries to get her into the nearest house. As the women gets her inside she suddenly turns as Jessica did and calmly sits inside a burning car. Malorie enters the house and is met by a small group who have also sought refuge. The occupants are the home’s owner Greg (BD Wong), his neighbour Douglas (John Malkovich) and other survivors Charlie (Lil Rel Howery), Tom (Trevante Rhodes), Lucy (Rosa Salazar), Cheryl (Jacki Weaver) and Felix (Machine Gun Kelly) who all ran in the house when things escalated. Between them they establish that there is something out there that will make you commit suicide if you look at it. They try to find loop holes, such as viewing it via CCTV but this fails. A car trip to the local supermarket is performed using blacked out windows and GPS and along the way they discover that not everyone is effected in the same way. The thing, whatever it is, has the ability of using people to then convince others to look at it, doing its dirty work for it/them. They are soon joined by Olympia (Danielle Macdonald), who is also pregnant, and who lets in a wandering survivor called Gary (Tom Hollander). Gary however is working for the thing and the happy little home becomes less happy. This is all inter-cut with Malorie paddling down a dangerous river with two children – all of them blindfolded. I thought the editing was very effective, we were given a beginning and an end but it was the middle that raised all the questions. Some questions remain unanswered, a problem that many people have, but without these questions there is no suspense. Certain characters run away and we don’t know what happened to them, but we don’t need to, all we need to know is that they’ve left the group worse off in their situation. To have endless killings would have reduced the suspense. We also never see ‘it’ which I think was probably quite important. It puts us in the characters perspective, as we stay with the survivors – they survive the film because they don’t see it and the same applies for the viewer. Seeing a monster would have cheapened the film immensely and I wonder whether The Quiet Ones would have been better without seeing so much. That said, their trick was silence, where Bird Box is all about sight. We fear what we can’t see and when we are told not to look at something we instinctively want to look at it. Without sight we feel vulnerable, vulnerability being one of our greatest fears. Then there is the fear of suicide. Most people know someone or know someone that knows a person who has taken their own life and it puzzles us that a person could do that to themselves and to others. We fear what we could be capable of, how slight change can effect us. These fears are ambiguous in many respects, so they haunt us somewhat. By never telling revealing what or why the mysterious entity is, Bird Box makes the viewer look into themselves. You can’t always fight something you can’t see, so you have to find other ways to survive. You can read so much into the film, making it a compelling and rather haunting thriller. The people the ‘whatever’ uses to lure in survivors were the most interesting aspect of the story for me. The first of them encountered we were told was ‘not all there’, while the other was a business man. We then had a man who sounded like a religious obsessive, followed by a group who I thought came across as a right-wing gang you’d find at a political rally. The character who suggested this was the coming of God, judgement day etc was the first person to die, which I think put that idea to rest. I wonder whether the story is actually about the world we live in today, the monster being everything from corrupt governments, big industry and the media. Those that choose not to look survive but they are essentially walking blind. There’s lots to speculate about. Big questions, great cast and suspense all the way. I think Sandra Bullock was brilliant in the lead role and I found the film a thrill from start to finish.