BIRDBOX REVIEW: Sandra Bullock’s Netflix thriller is…

At the start of Susanne Bier’s apocalyptic thriller Bird Box, Sandra Bullock’s face fills the screen, daring the camera to break eye contact. Her Mallory is stern and commanding – Bullock’s in drill sergeant mode, not America’s sweetheart – and she doesn’t care about sounding kind. Outside, there are creatures who will kill you with a gaze.

The audience never sees them ourselves, but we catch glimpses of their presence: the leaves rustle, the birds squawk and the unlucky victim’s pupils glaze over, turning red and watery as the viewers instantly kill themselves with the closest weapon: a window, a car, a desk – whatever’s handy.

The opening scene is the present, with Malorie brusquely instructing two children, Boy (Julian Edwards) and Girl (Vivien Lyra Blair), about the treacherous journey on which they are about to embark down a river in a canoe. Once outside, they must never take off their blindfolds, or They. Will. Die.“If you look, you will die,” Mallory orders. The two small children stare back in silent fear.

Bullocks’ character has spent five years surviving this plague-Armageddon, most of them trapped in a strangers house. She’s outlasted the rest of her random roommates, a grab-bag of people who, like her, blundered into the first open door the morning most of the planet got massacred.

Now, she has to shepherd these kids out of their home, into a rowboat, and down a dangerous river – blindfolded. For days. Sighs Mallory: “It’s going to feel like it’s going on for a long time.”

Boy, does it.

“Bird Box,” an adaptation of Josh Malerman’s novel, jumps between two timelines under the premise “What if M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Happening,’ in which people mysteriously begin killing themselves, had blindfolds?”

Bier and her Netflix producers have made a chiller that includes every trend from the sensory deprivation horror of Don’t Breathe and A Quiet Place to JJ Abrams’ mysterious monsters to thunderingly thematic sci-fi like Arrival, which screenwriter Eric Heisserer also penned.

Bird Box’s pieces feel forcibly screwed together, a movie marionetted by strings of data code like Frankensteins’ Monster. There are good scenes and smart ideas, but overall, the movie mostly chomps like a Great White chowing down on an unsuspecting surfer.

Tense sequences, like an early attempt to head out for food at a locked farmers market, are capped by clunky punchlines while the climax is almost guaranteed to get giggles.

OTHER PLAYERS:

The ensemble, too, feels as curated as a box of donuts. There’s the classic crowd-pleasers such as Bullock and John Malkovich as an alcoholic crank named Douglas, who blames Mallory for the death of his third wife. (His second, he admits, said hell “couldn’t be worse than being married to me”.) Lil Rel Howery (“Get Out”) is Charlie, a supermarket employee who just so happens to be writing a novel about the end of humanity; and Tom, Trevante Rhodes (“Moonlight”) is the strapping, sensitive war vet who connects with Malorie. Danielle Macdonald plays Olympia, a woman who, like Malorie, is pregnant, but extremely happy about it.

And the hapless, Jacki Weaver and BD Wong are here, too, though they have even less to do, with barely any back story or distinguishing traits.

As the survivors’ hole up in the house, the usual end-of-the-world conflicts arise: Do they let in others suddenly banging on the door for help? Can anyone be trusted?

Is surviving actually living? (Non-spoiler: Nope.)

Some saving graces: the disturbing set piece in which the creature first descends upon the city and, later, a genuinely unnerving scene in which Malorie leaves Boy and Girl behind in the canoe so she can replenish supplies.

SAVING GRACE – THE INFECTED

At first, it seems as though everyone who lays eyes on the mysterious entities immediately commits suicide, but a trip to Charlie’s store for supplies reveals that this isn’t the case, as his colleague Fish Finger has seen the entities and become infected or corrupted by them. Infected people worship entities like gods and are obsessed with trying to get other people to look at them as well, making them extremely dangerous.

Gary, the stranger who is let into the house by Olympia, at first seems to be just another survivor… until it’s revealed that he’s been corrupted by the entities and is really there to sabotage the group.

Gary is played by British actor Tom Hollander, who has appeared in films like In The Loop and About Time, and this year played Queen manager Jim Beach in Bohemian Rhapsody. Hollanders’ character oozes a vulnerable charm in the movie, and has a key role in destroying the household in which he’s been let into. A standout performance by the Brit actor.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

The end result of these supernatural creatures (if you’re looking for the film’s “hook”) is that the characters can’t go outside with their eyes open, yet too often “Bird Box” walks right up to the edge of pure suspense but mainly disappoints and would easily fall apart if it lacked Bullock, and some of the other contributors, but, fortuitously, it survives the storm of being a rather standard saga.

3/5 STARS