Songbird (2021) - Movie Review

Making a film intrinsically about COVID-19, while COVID-19 is still a thing and still a danger to public health, isn’t an inherently bad idea. All art is reflective of the era in which it was made, and film is no exception; knowing how much the pandemic has fucked up the industry in regards to getting work done and released, working around the conditions involved shouldn’t automatically be seen as a bad thing. I’m not saying that exploiting the situation for profit isn’t shady as all fuck; just that not every production in this space should be seen as such. At least, not until it proves itself to be in that vein.

After what happened with Locked Down, I went into this other film set during COVID lockdown (in a roundabout way, which I’ll get to) with far lower expectations. Other than hearing a fair bit of negative press about it since it first released in the U.S. in December, I’ve resigned myself to the notion that Host was going to be a rare example of a film made in extraordinary circumstances that was itself an extraordinary work of art. I’ve been seeing the word “tasteless” floating around a lot in discussions about Songbird, hence my little spiel about the supposed ethics problems with making a film about a pandemic while said pandemic is still happening, so I was ready for the worst of it. And while that's unfortunately what I got, it wasn't in the form I was expecting.

Watching this under-90-minute film in real time is a bizarre experience all on its own, especially with all that pre-established bad press in the background, as it doesn’t start out all that bad. Admittedly, it being about the ‘COVID-23’ pandemic is worth the eye-rolls it gets, and the main threat of armed men in hazmat suits dragging civilians into quarantine zones is a bit much. It’s like they tried to mash together two separate attempts at being relevant (COVID lockdown and police brutality) and wound up garbling them both into a message that’s… kinda suss if you think about it for too long.

But again, besides that, the way the film establishes its initial tone was actually working for me at the start. Most of the dialogue for the first half-or-so establishes relationships between characters and the need for interaction with others in the midst of all this chaos, a feeling that has been well ingrained in the popular consciousness over the past year. The acting itself can vary quite wildly (KJ Apa is surprisingly solid in the lead, while Demi Moore is… here, for reasons I don’t even think she is cognizant of), but the rapport between them is likeable. The inclusion of Alexandra Daddario as May, who sings on livestreams that most of the other characters watch, even tapped into some Gridlock feels about banding together in song in the face of a cramped existence.

However, as the film continues on, any goodwill I’m able to generate for this begins to unravel at increasingly-violent speeds. For a start, the film craft on display is incredibly shoddy. While most of it is shot with hand-held cameras, there’s sporadic moments of found-footage-ish camera stock in the form of video calls, the aforementioned livestreaming, head-cams on the goons in the hazmat suits, all of which is decidedly worse-looking than the normal footage and sticks out in a bad way because of it. To say nothing of when this film tries to go all-in on the thrills, with ‘action scenes’ that are so nauseating and over-edited that they come across as parodies of overblown Michael Bay set pieces. Knowing that Michael Bay actually did direct these scenes just makes that even funnier.

The story as a whole is about as slapped together, just to make things even worse. In fact, it’s the kind of fragile storytelling where, much like with Downsizing a couple years ago, I can pinpoint the moment when the film begins the prolonged meeting between its face and the concrete floor. That comes with the initial scene between Daddario and Bradley Whitford that I can only reasonably describe as ‘reluctant COVID fetish play’, which comes so far out of left field that it only serves to scramble any sense of what-the-actual-hell-is-even-going-on the audience may have beforehand. And it only gets worse from there, with a bunch of overlayed character interactions that are rudimentary at best, only resulting in muddying the film’s reason for being set during COVID in the first place.

Quite frankly, it’s far more interested in the love story between Apa’s courier and Sofia Carson, which is not only more treacly than it’s worth but they aren’t even the most interesting coupling in the film to begin with. Again, the Daddario/Whitford dynamic is aggressively weird and somehow makes less sense of that love scene(?!) the longer it shambles onward, but at least that has more going for it than the mildest of mild social distancing blues. Not only that, but for as much as it tries to make the audience invested in this romance, it’s almost impossible to take the bulk of this film seriously because this has some of the worst dialogue I’ve heard in a very long time.

We’ve got the information overload over the opening credits where someone says “Remember the good old days of Fake News? Well, the real news is worse.” (which is rich, coming from a film that needs to overdramatise an epidemic that’s already fucking happening). And then there’s Apa’s closing speech, which includes the gem “We weren’t just delivering packages. We were delivering hope.” (it’s trying so hard to be Death Stranding, it’s almost impressive). Everything in-between banks on the performances to be salvageable at all, but try as they might, there’s not a soul on Earth who can make this shit palatable. Not even Peter Stormare in his delightfully-kooky norm can make his blurry character motivations make any bleeding sense.

Songbird may not be the ‘Last Days Of American Crime of COVID’ I was expecting from all the word-of-mouth this has already garnered, but I’m still quite taken aback at how terrible this film is just as a film. It’s the narrative equivalent of watching the time-lapse of a body decomposing, as whatever resemblance of structure this once may have possessed quickly breaks down and collapses into a pile only fit for maggots to writhe in, leaving me worried about the circumstances that led to it occurring.

The narrative is so wayward as to make the timely backdrop feel trivial, the production values suck, the actors give the impression that they were all told they were in drastically different films from each other and edited together without their foreknowledge, and when it gets to the point where even I can’t get into the sentimental side of a given film, you know you done fucked up. It may not aggravate me as much as Locked Down ultimately did, but the level of sheer bewilderment I feel towards this thing is about as strong.