Bird Box (2018)

dir. Susanne Bier
writ. Eric Heisserer (screenplay), Josh Malerman (novel)
feat. Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson


--> Here there be spoilers. Ah, Netflix, you're a mad mess of productions. Living in Los Angeles while both Roma and Bird Box were released, it was fascinating to see both plastered over every available surface, including Bird Box buses that I took solely for mobile billboards, something you can park on the Venice boardwalk where there isn't a board to buy until I passed again to see a troop of meekly smiling suckers in blindfolds standing around the bus. 
While I don't know the BBB experience, it's at least shorter than the film viewing one, as well as partially blindfolded. The billboards alone were enough to give the scent of a reverse engineered apocalyptic sci-fi romp. What if the plague came in through the eyes and everyone had to be blindfolded?! And once the weed is slept off, you're stuck carrying that out. 

Bullock plays Malorie, a pregnant overwrought misanthropic artist who hates humanity enough that you can't fathom why she skipped the abortion before the don’t-look-or-you’ll-kill-yourself wind plague comes to town. The character is all broad strokes, sneers and castigating "wit" perhaps meant to be excused as artist's temperament. Sarah Paulson plays Jessica, Malorie's nice sister, briefly riding along for exposition until the aforementioned wind kicks up. We then slip into a low rent Stephen King's The Mist situation in a house where a real melting pot of characters fake conflict while annoying John Malkovich, who I wondered for a minute if he was playing himself, actually pissed at these intruders using his house as their sanctuary. 

Chaos and shouting carry the flick this far, but then we start breaking our world's rules, first with a blind drive through what we'd seen as impassable streets hours before, aided by a magical blinking console light. That alone would be fine, a film will stretch what's possible and needs twists. Fine. 

But there are too many successive amazing feats completed in blindfolds that quickly move from intriguing and challenging to tiresome and laughable. You can't help but wonder if the root of the story is a slim, God will save you, message. Maybe that would jibe with the crazy people who can survive the view, but in turn become even greater enemies. Then, maybe it's a Catholic Church-inspired apocalypse and the clear-eyed gnostics with their direct contact with the higher power are the most savage and lost, thus encouraging good people to operate blindly. Nah.

Instead, it feels like no one spent considerable effort thinking about how much time really passes in the film, instead just blocking out a handful of action scenes and those high risk blindfolded tasks. It's reminiscent of the faults of the count of those disappeared in The Leftovers (1 in 100 doesn’t affect everyone that deeply) or where you’d get all that damn sand in A Quiet Place. Yes Malorie, you’d name those kids, and no, even you wouldn't think you'd done everything for their survival.