Bird Box ★★★
OCCASIONALLY a film comes along that you know little about.
And sometimes it can be a pleasant surprise, like the 2018 horror/thriller Bird Box.
This is the film that M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening from 2008 should have been.
Shyamalan has delivered some of the modern era’s best horror/thrillers but, unfortunately, The Happening wasn’t one of them.
That story of a sudden plague causing people to commit suicide was ultimately confused, meandering and suffered from some pretty average acting in key roles. The fact it didn’t reveal a discernible reason for the plague also counted against it with audiences.
Bird Box also doesn’t provide all the answers to a similar set-up, which some people will hate, but the journey it takes us on is far more interesting, tension-filled and, most importantly, filled with more interesting characters.
Danish director Susanne Bier and script writer Eric Heisserer choose wisely in splitting the film between the present and past, thus providing two narrative tensions.
In the present, a woman and two young children must leave their home, run to a dinghy and row down a river to a safe haven. We don’t know exactly why, but we do know they have to accomplish all this while blindfolded, to avoid looking at an unnatural atmospheric phenomenon.
Their journey in the present is interspersed with longer sequences from five years previously, starting with the moments when the phenomenon first hit the population with a vengeance, causing people who saw it to immediately commit suicide.
These are particularly effective with people suddenly crashing cars, walking into the paths of speeding trucks, stabbing themselves or getting into burning cars. It’s like a scene from Dante’s Inferno played out in suburban streets and front yards.
We meet the woman from the present story, Malorie, played by Sandra Bullock, and her sister Jessica, played by Sarah Poulson, who find themselves caught amidst the carnage while trying to get the pregnant Malorie to hospital.
Malorie finds refuge in a barricaded suburban home along with the owner Douglas, his neighbour and several others including several men, another younger pregnant woman and an elderly woman.
The situation is manageable, until the food starts to run out and the group must work out how to get to the nearest supermarket undetected by not just this natural phenomenon but also some other people who seem to have recovered from the original impact and are determined to make others “see” by whatever means required.
There are some brutal moments and the film doesn’t mind which characters it kills, adding to the overall tension. Unfortunately, the final act doesn’t deliver quite the punch that has been promised.
Sandra Bullock is very good as always – she’s an actress who can turn herself to any type of role – and there is good support from the ever-busy Poulson as her sister, John Malkovich in menacing mode as the owner of the house where the group takes refuge and a talented bunch of actors including Trevante Rhodes, BD Wong, Jackie Weaver and Tom Hollander.
Aside from Weaver, the other Australian in the supporting cast is Danielle Macdonald, playing the other pregnant woman, who made such a great debut in 2017’s PattiCake$.
This is the Danish director’s 14th film, most of which have been shot in her home country and language. Bier came to prominence in 2010 when In a Better World won the Best Foreign Language Film at both the Golden Globe and Academy awards.
Unfortunately I haven’t seen that film or Serena, her 2014 Hollywood debut with the dream pairing at the time of Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. That film didn’t receive strong reviews, but she also directed episodes of the highly-regarded television drama The Night Manager.