Bird Box (2018) - Movie Review

  

It’s a little too easy to just cut to the chase and see this as an attempt to cash in on A Quiet Place. Atmospheric horror tied directly to one of the human senses, with heavy emphasis on parenthood through the characters; the ties exist, is all I’m saying. But more so than that, this concept feels like someone looked at The Happening and went “Okay, there has to be a way to do this story without it being completely stupid.” A mysterious force is making the human population commit suicide, and the few that remain have to try and survive without getting exposed to that force. It’s an idea that honestly is worth trying to make palatable, and the attempt made here ain’t half bad.

For one, this benefits from being less specific about the force itself. The most detail we get is that they’re some kind of creatures, ones that have roots in a lot of ancient mythology, who can make people see something that terrifies them so much that they try and kill themselves if they so much as glance at them. And not only that, but they have gained… followers among the human population who see their arrival as part of a divine cleansing of the Earth. Between these two, the possibilities for tense moments are quite high, which the film mostly takes advantage of.

Knowing what happened last time writer Eric Heisserer gave us a film involving suicide (read: It got sabotaged by the utter fucking coward of a director it had, and no, I have no qualms whatsoever in making that assessment), it’s at least good to know that his knack for more common sense thinking from both that and Arrival endures here. Yeah, there’s still some dumb character decisions made here and there (yes, check the security cameras for those monsters with no-one else around, I’m sure nothing will go wrong with that plan) but it definitely shows attempts to have rationality as part of the narrative.

However, a lot of the film’s tension ends up being sapped by what is a rather irrational way of framing the narrative. It’s like the two halves of the film were slotted into each other, intercutting between the beginning of the event and five years later. Admittedly, this is how the source material told the story as well, but when trying to make a thriller, it helps when you don’t basically show us who survives right from the start.

But even with that said, it’s a testament to the presentation that it still manages to do the idea justice in spite of that rather annoying hiccup. Not entire justice, as there remains a feeling that there is still something a bit more psychological that could be done with this idea, but certainly gives the idea merit and backs it with good actors and a decent script. Or, to put it another way, credit is due in managing to turn one of Shyamalan’s dumber stories into something worth watching beyond irony.