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“Bird Box,” Reviewed: An Apocalypse Built for Netflix

By Richard Brody

A family saying has come down through the generations: for free, even vinegar would taste sweet. Its proof can be found on Netflix, in the form of “Bird Box.” Sandra Bullock stars as Malorie, a woman who is first seen sternly exhorting two young children, a girl and a boy, never to remove their blindfolds. The three of them enter a rowboat and Malorie, also blindfolded, sightlessly guides the boat downriver. The movie, which co-stars Trevante Rhodes, is an apocalyptic horror film in which the end of the world comes in the form of mass suicide. The trio’s river journey is intercut with flashbacks showing how they got there.

It turns out that what drives people to instantaneous self-destruction is seeing a certain thing, which first manifested itself in Eastern Europe and Russia, and quickly turns up in the United States. The only way to stay safe is not to see at all. Bullock and Rhodes play Malorie and Tom, two of a handful of survivors holed up in a house in Sacramento, while mayhem prevails outside. The group’s struggle to survive is interwoven with the struggles in the wild faced by Malorie and the children—and by a trio of birds that she has packed into a box to join them on the journey. (They turn out to be, in effect, mineshaft canaries—reliable heralds of danger.)

“Bird Box,” directed by Susanne Bier, is based on a novel by Josh Malerman. The script, written by Eric Heisserer, ranked at the top of the 2014 “Blood List” of best unproduced horror screenplays, and it’s a satisfyingly high-concept contrivance. The spontaneous suicides (including a series of intentionally provoked car accidents) elicit a quick chill. A more imaginatively macabre treatment of the subject would present a wide range of variations on the theme of self-destruction—and would explicitly risk an element of comedic camp. Instead, the movie falls into it unintentionally and likely unawares.

The movie’s incoherence is in its point of view: it depicts the characters in their struggle to survive, and shows much of the world that surrounds them, but, since the survivors are the ones who never see the thing, the movie never shows it. It does, however, show just enough of the thing’s effect—a wind-like whipping-up of swirls of leaves—to deflate the potential existential terror of a completely traceless thing, a seeming neutron bomb of suicidal impulse. Also, to show blindfoldedness, Bier includes flashes throughout of the translucent meshy blue of the fabric around Malorie’s eyes—but never long enough to capture the terror that a sighted person can conjure in an instant by closing her eyes while walking in the street or the woods.

There’s a synesthetic failure to the direction. Malorie uses a variety of aids—not just sound but also a line unspooled from a reel—to find her way back to a starting point. Yet Bier, merely depicting the dangers faced by Malorie and the others in efforts to survive tough landscapes without seeing them, emphasizes the macro level of large-scale obstacles (and shows them, briefly, with an eye to catastrophe averted) but elides the intimacy of micro-scale experience, the actual feeling, conveyed cinematically and largely visually, of the tactile subjectivity of the perilous ventures. Bier doesn’t experience the events with the characters; she depicts them being put through the paces required by the script. (Even the clamorous, calamity-evoking music, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, merges with sound effects to detract from what ought to be a viewer’s experience of impending doom and render them instead as auditory puppet-show fright masks.)

Similarly, these dangerous ventures, whether with a larger group in city streets or with the trio of Malorie and the children in the wild, are filmed with illustrative approximations, in generic gestures and fragments. The melodramatic tone, and the increasingly menacing set of dangers that Malorie and the children face in their rustic flight—set throughout with looming closeups in which characters register and express a fear that the images don’t themselves convey—make for a earnest sound-film variant on what could have been a masterstroke of silent-film comedy.

“Bird Box,” transmitted to viewers by algorithm, appears to have been composed dramatically by algorithm as well. One character (whom I won’t identify, to avoid spoilers) tells the struggling survivors that there are two kinds of people—“the assholes and the dead”—and the entire movie is devoted to defying that Manichean thesis. Yet it does so in a cut-to-order American-mainstream way, rooted in rugged survivalist ways of life. Malorie, an artist and the daughter of a man she reviles but calls “a real cowboy,” grew up on an actual farm among horses and learned young to handle a gun; Tom is an Iraq War veteran who reminisces warmly about his outfit’s humanitarian deeds. They’re a pair of badasses who also prove that they’re goodasses. By contrast, another woman among the survivors (played by Danielle Macdonald) laments and even apologizes for having been raised by caring parents and married to a loving man who thereby made her “soft.” (The conceit isn’t offensive but the depiction is: this “soft” character is also the only fat person in the group, her body type being crudely correlated with a moral trait, and a negative one at that.)

The manipulation of time, as the action flips back and forth between the endgame of the river journey and the earlier time of the catastrophe’s onset and Malorie’s escape with the children, is the movie’s most impressive and memorable maneuver, though a hollow one. Time-manipulated movies, which require extreme forethought and preclude improvisation, are, by their nature, literary ones. (It’s no accident that the great modern time-shifting director, Alain Resnais, started with scripts by the literary notables Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet.) The script of “Bird Box” fails not only at the level of psychological insight but also at the level of ordinary science-fiction world building, with some key character traits (again, avoiding spoilers) remaining utterly unexplained despite the fact that they relate very specifically to the catastrophic events in question. “Bird Box” is a toy-chest apocalypse in which the rules of the game are, to all appearances, never understood—yet that confrontation with bewildering mystery never crops up as a theme of discussion among characters who have to confront it. The movie’s nuts-and-bolts protagonists never look past immediate needs to consider the societal or cosmic causes or implications of the catastrophe. Their hermetic self-reliance and self-interestedness, for all its ideological implications, are the dramatic reflection of a fictional world that’s thinly and lazily conceived.

Netflix notoriously doesn’t, in general, report viewership numbers. Yet it couldn’t resist crowing that more than forty-five million subscribers watched “Bird Box” in its first week online. How would it have done in a traditional wide theatrical release? Would it have taken in four hundred million dollars at the box-office in its first week alone? I suspect that its viewership depends upon its low barrier to entry. Even just the extraordinary cast, which also includes John Malkovich, Jacki Weaver, Lil Rel Howery, and Sarah Paulson, is good enough to watch for free. Unfortunately, “Bird Box” puts these performers through familiar paces, in roles of such tight typecasting that they seem like recurring characters in an extended TV series—which may also be part of the secret to the film’s Netflix success.

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Love is blind, we are often told. We hear as well about blind faith or being blinded by fear. From Greek mythology's Medusa to Jose Saramago's novel, BLINDNESS, vision --- or the lack thereof --- is a powerful metaphor in storytelling. Josh Malerman's debut, BIRD BOX, is a horror novel that plays with this theme, placing it in a nightmarish tale of survival.

It starts with bizarre and violent events in Russia. Malorie pays little attention to the news, but her sister, Shannon, becomes increasingly worried about the so-called “Russian Report.” By the time the incidents, senseless physical attacks ending in suicides, begin occurring in America, Malorie is distracted by her unplanned pregnancy. Three months later, the sisters are holed up in their house, fearing “the Problem” that is still not understood and claiming lives around the world. The only protection seems to be staying indoors, covering all windows so that the unknown entities driving people to insanity remain unseen. The threat remains elusive but dangerous nonetheless. Malorie loses Shannon after one peek outside and finds herself alone, pregnant and out of resources.

"Suspenseful and inventive, BIRD BOX, like other good scary books, asks readers to leave the rational behind in exchange for a thrilling tale and to face fears with eyes open wide."

So begins Malorie’s first journey as she travels in a car with the windows blacked out, to a house she hopes will be safe and welcoming. She comes to spend the next four years in the house that she first shares with a strong and wise man named Tom, another pregnant woman, Olympia, and a handful of others. Together they eek out a life with the stored food they have and water from an outside well. When a man named Gary arrives, he threatens their fragile security, and at the end of one horrific night, Malorie finds herself alone again. Or, almost alone; now she is a mother with two children to take care of.

BIRD BOX moves between time, from Malorie's current situation with Boy and Girl, to the events that led up to it. Malerman maneuvers smoothly back and forth, and the tension is nicely built. The second journey is a river ride Malorie takes with her children seeking safety and community, and the three of them must make it blind, relying only on the skills they have honed of hearing and intuition.

This is a novel with no clear resolution or answers. What it does have is a unique enemy, a compelling protagonist, a slow-burning sense of dread, and a knack for making the improbable believable. Malorie's life with Boy and Girl, and the training she gives them in order to escape the house and survive, make little sense if read too closely, but it works in the story as crafted by Malerman. With some familiar aspects from zombie and post-apocalyptic stories, the author manages to add some interesting twists of his own. Suspenseful and inventive, BIRD BOX, like other good scary books, asks readers to leave the rational behind in exchange for a thrilling tale and to face fears with eyes open wide.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman on May 23, 2014

Bird Box by Josh Malerman

• Publication Date: February 10, 2015
• Genres: Fiction , Horror , Suspense , Thriller
• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Ecco
• ISBN-10: 0062259660
• ISBN-13: 9780062259660

Columns > Published on December 28th, 2018

Book vs. Film: "Bird Box"

Josh Malerman's novel Bird Box sent nearly instant ripples through the literary community upon its publication in 2014, with fans and critics alike touting it as one of the finest horror books of the 21st century. It received nominations for the James Herbert Award and the Bram Stoker Award for best debut novel, while  Publisher's Weekly even compared Malerman to Stephen King, with several other reviews echoing the sentiment.

With such accolades and fervor surrounding the book, a film adaptation naturally got underway. It took four years for Bird Box to see the light of day, arriving in the form of a Netflix original film that also played in select theaters around the country. Early reviews have been mixed, with some critics claiming the film is nothing more than A Quiet Place knockoff—a faulty argument because, one, Malerman's book came out well before A Quiet Place hit screens in 2018, and two, besides the obvious parallels of mysterious creatures, using sensory elements as a vehicle for terror, and terrifying birthing scenes, the two narratives have very little in common. The aforementioned King, moreover, believes the negative reviews had more to do with streaming platform snobbery than the film's merits, of which he insists are plentiful. 

At least in this writer's opinion, King's assessment is correct: Bird Box as a film is taut, tense, emotionally rich, and psychologically dense. Compared to Malerman's novel, it stands on its own, a decidedly visual and aural experience, as cinema should be; it's not quite spectacle, though a particularly knuckle-biting action sequence near the beginning of the film dips its toes into spectacular waters (and this is not a criticism, mind you). 

Plot-wise, the film is virtually identical to its literary counterpart, beginning with a woman sternly, even militantly, outlining what seems tantamount to a suicide mission to a boy and girl. We further learn that this is all the woman, Mallory (played superbly by Sandra Bullock) calls the five-year-olds—Boy and Girl—and that they must brave a dangerous journey on an old rowboat down a river, in the hopes of making it to a sanctuary stocked with people and enough food and supplies to last for years. The biggest caveat here is that Mallory and the children must make this risky trek while blindfolded, as there are strange monsters lurking outside that drive people to insanity just by looking at them. 

SPOILER ALERT!

Flashbacks reveal the onset of this apocalypse-inducing epidemic, explaining how Mallory came to be the hard-lined captain of this potentially (read: very likely) deadly voyage. We learn that Mallory became pregnant after a fling with her roommate, who afterwards vanished from her life, and though she plans to birth the child, seriously considers giving him or her up for adoption; however, her sister Jessica (the always engaging Sarah Paulson) seems convinced Mallory will eventually fall in love with her child. 

Following this, Mallory stumbles into the nearby home of Greg (B.D. Wong), who has invited several of his neighbors in to weather out the apocalypse (at least temporarily). This gang includes Tom (Trevante Rhodes), an ex-soldier turned construction worker who provides tacit leadership and a moral compass for the band of survivors as the narrative proceeds (he's also a love interest for Mallory) and Douglas (John Malkovich) an alcoholic and self-described asshole who spouts light Trumpisms and cares only for his own survival. There is a host of others that don't necessarily need mentioning, not because they're unimportant gore fodder (though there is much more bloodshed to follow), but because we simply don't have the time to list them all out and discuss their various character traits here. They're not all exactly the same as their book counterparts, but they work well in this cinematic landscape.

As the days eclipse into weeks, another pregnant woman, Olympia (Danielle Macdonald), joins the group, followed not long after by Gary (Tom Hollander), whose arrival ultimately spells doom for the survivors: he is one of many characters in the narrative who have seen the monsters and not instantly offed themselves (what separates these people from the rest of the population, we do not know, though it's suggested certain mental conditions provide a layer of "protection" that causes madness but not suicidal tendencies). Gary further believes that the monsters have arrived to cleanse the Earth, that seeing them in all their glory is "beautiful," even if the sight of them leads to death. He sets about removing all the protections the survivors have placed around the house—he rips newspapers from the windows, lifts blinds, open doors, all so that the monsters may come into the home and reveal themselves. This act coincides with Mallory and Olympia going into labor at the same time, with Gary especially insistent upon making their newborn infants gaze upon the creatures. While this does not occur, Olympia sees one of the entities and hurls herself out of an upstairs window. Mallory protects both babies while Gary scuffles first with Douglas then Tom—the former dies by Gary's hand, while the latter manages to blow him away with a shotgun.

Here, the film makes its most impactful departure from Malerman's work. In the novel, Tom also dies and Gary escapes the house, leaving Mallory all alone. She relocates and begins training the children how to survive this new world. She treats her son no differently from Olympia's daughter; they are both, effectively, her kids, but her love is tough, even abrasive at times. She does not name them for the sheer fact that names are a luxury in this harsh, death-suffused world. If Mallory does not prepare them, if she doesn't ensure they have the tools to make it, then, quite simply, they won't. Her treatment of the kids comes across as cold, even shocking at times, but we understand the behavior, even if we may not entirely agree with it. It's her responsibility to raise these children, to ensure their survival; if she fails them, she believes, their deaths will be on her hands. Moreover, if they die, she will have lost everyone and everything she ever held dear, and this loss might be too much, in the end, for Mallory to bear.

The character's behavior and motivations in the film are identical to the book, but with Tom at her side as a partner and de facto father to the children for the first five years of their lives, it seems less likely Mallory would be as hard on Boy and Girl as she is, especially with Tom's kinder, gentler approach to all things. This matter is indeed addressed within the film, as Mallory and Tom have an argument about giving the children any false senses of hope, and Tom even chastises her for having not given them proper names. Dramatically speaking, this moment works in terms of establishing the climax, in which Mallory finally softens some of her parenting skills in order to better gain the trust of Girl, who is often terrified of her pseudo-mother, but it also feels a bit unrealistic that this argument would not have occurred much earlier in the children's lives. Mallory and Tom have more or less been living as a married couple all this time, and despite the outside threats, they seem to be fairly comfortable and overall safe. Again, if Mallory were all alone, as she is the novel, her militant raising of the children would make more sense; but with Tom's influence there the entire time, it isn't as emotionally effective.

But this is the film's only real flaw, and it pales in comparison to its achievements. Director Susanne Bier and screenwriter Eric Heisserer speak the language of cinema well, turning Malerman's slightly more introspective work into a horror thriller with very little downtime. The sequence of chaos that properly introduces the creatures and their mind-altering abilities is one of the best of the apocalyptic sub-genre, and casting the popular and recognizable Sarah Paulson, only to kill her character off in brutal fashion within the first half-hour, is a classic familiar-face-misdirect in the tradition of Psycho and Scream . Even if you've read the novel and know that Mallory's sister succumbs to the monsters, the scene is nonetheless an effective shocker that makes you wonder who among the impeccable cast might be next. 

The film's finest achievement, however is its refusal to actually show the monsters. Reportedly , producers attempted to force Heisserer and Bier to reveal them at one point in the film, but thankfully, the scene was cut. Instead, all we ever see of them are vague shadows and leaves that suddenly defy gravity whenever the monsters are near; there are also Gary's sketches, which he lays out on a coffee table just prior to opening the house up for the creatures to enter, but if you look closely, each sketch differs from the last, leading us to believe they're either constantly shapeshifting, or Gary's perception of the monsters isn't altogether reliable (the latter scenario is more likely, given his madness). Malerman never shows us the creatures either, and this is crucial to a narrative that hinges on characters completely losing their minds upon even the briefest glimpse of these entities. Nothing created in a special effects shop or on a computer could be as terrifying as what the viewer's mind will conjure, and thus, to show the creatures would be a major detriment to the narrative. Kudos to Bier and Heisserer for sticking to their guns and keeping the monsters out of sight. 

Overall, Bird Box is a fine novel adaptation and a solid entry not only to the great horror films of 2018, but of the larger apocalyptic subgenre. Hopefully, it will make household names of Beir, Heisserer, and Malerman, in the same way Brian De Palma's Carrie helped to skyrocket Stephen King into his Master of Horror status.

Get  Bird Box  at Bookshop or Amazon

About the author

Christopher Shultz writes plays and fiction. His works have appeared at The Inkwell Theatre's Playwrights' Night , and in Pseudopod , Unnerving Magazine , Apex Magazine , freeze frame flash fiction and Grievous Angel , among other places. He has also contributed columns on books and film at LitReactor , The Cinematropolis , and Tor.com . Christopher currently lives in Oklahoma City. More info at christophershultz.com

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Bird Box never quite reaches its intriguing potential, but strong acting and an effectively chilly mood offer intermittently creepy compensation.

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Last year, Netflix dropped the high-budget “ Bright ” just before the holidays and it turned out to be a pretty massive sci-fi hit for the company, even if critics hated it. So, apparently, futuristic action movies are now going to be what the company gives us for Christmas every year. How’s this year’s cinematic sci-fi stocking stuffer, "Bird Box"? It’s imperfect, but you probably won’t be returning it.

Undercooked metaphors about motherhood and a mishandled climax aside, there’s enough to like in Susanne Bier ’s “Bird Box,” premiering on Netflix after a limited theatrical release today. Most of its strength emerges from a well-directed ensemble, one able to convey the high concept of a nightmarish situation without losing their relatable humanity. Lazy critics and viewers will compare it to “ A Quiet Place ” (I've already seen it called "A Blind Place"), but this is a piece that actually draws more from “ Stephen King ’s The Mist,” another tale of the paranoia that invades a group of strangers when they’re dealing with both the unknown and the worry that they may never again see the outside world or fully understand what's hiding in it. I'm a sucker for King-inspired things, and this one hits that chord well enough to be worth a look over your Christmas break. In particular, Sandra Bullock does typically solid work, buoyed by a great supporting cast that includes the should-be-a-star Trevante Rhodes , Jacki Weaver , Danielle Macdonald , Sarah Paulson , and John Malkovich .   

Based on Josh Malerman ’s novel, “Bird Box” intercuts between two time periods—about five years after the end of the world and in the first days when everything collapsed. It opens in the nightmarish present, but actually spends more time in flashbacks with Malorie (Bullock), an expectant mother unsure about whether or not she’ll form a connection with her baby. She expresses as much to her sister Jessica (Paulson) on the way to a meeting with her obstetrician, as the two discuss reports of mass suicides on the other side of the world. And then “whatever” is happening over there comes home as people start to hurl themselves out of windows and into oncoming traffic. These early scenes of absolute chaos are well-handled by Bier and honestly terrifying. She captures complete chaos on what appears to be a relatively limited budget, realizing the power of stark imagery—a woman bashing her head into a glass window or another calmly getting into the driver’s seat of a burning car—over the CGI overload we so often see in post-apocalyptic movies.

What is driving the mass suicides? Anyone who is outside “sees something,” although what they see is left marvelously undefined. Whatever it is causes their eyes to go all psychedelic and they take their own lives. (Well, most of them do. But that’s for later in the movie.) A small band of survivors takes shelter, including the irascible Douglas (Malkovich), also-pregnant Olympia (Macdonald), excitable Charlie ( LilRel Howery ), and inevitable love interest Tom (Rhodes). As they run of out of supplies and realize that they’re going to have to get to a store somehow, distrust grows. And no one can quite agree on whether or not they should ever answer the door.

The “survivors” material is intercut with the present-day material of Malorie and two children called only Boy (Julian Edwards) and Girl (Vivien Lyra Blair) on a journey down a treacherous river. They wear blindfolds and are reminded constantly by Malorie that they better not take them off—no matter what they hear. The fact that we only see Malorie, and what anyone who’s seen a movie can presume are her and Olympia’s children, adds a sense of dread to the flashback material. Everyone else in the flashbacks is probably going to die.

And they do, but “Bird Box” is not your typical horror movie. It’s refreshingly devoid of big action sequences and CGI, relying more on the fear experienced by its characters than actual supernatural interactions. In a sense, it’s a reverse haunted house movie, one in which it’s not the one house that’s haunted but everything outside of it. How long could you survive with a group of strangers who are increasingly distrustful of each other as rations run short? Bier directs her cast expertly, allowing them nice little character beats that lesser directors would have ignored.

Most of the problems with “Bird Box” come back to a thin screenplay, one that too often gives its characters flat, expository dialogue and then writes itself into a corner with a climax that’s just silly when it needs to be tense. I haven’t read the book on which “Bird Box” is based, but it seems like the kind of thing that could work significantly better on the page, where our imaginations can run even more wild regarding what the characters are “seeing” and the scope of the mass suicides. Eric Heisserer's script works better when it sticks to the basics, locking us in what could be the last safe place on Earth and allowing us to ask how we’d behave in such a nightmarish predicament. And it does that just enough to find beats that are honestly tense and terrifying. Happy holidays, everybody. 

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Bird Box (2018)

124 minutes

Sandra Bullock as Malorie

Trevante Rhodes as Tom

Sarah Paulson as Shannon

Danielle Macdonald as Olympia

LilRel Howery as Charlie

John Malkovich as Douglas

• Susanne Bier

Writer (novel)

• Josh Malerman
• Eric Heisserer

Cinematographer

• Salvatore Totino
• Trent Reznor
• Atticus Ross

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Bird Box Review

Since John Krasinski 's A Quiet Place recently explored the terrifying journey of a family in an apocalyptic world through an unnerving assault of the senses, at first glance Netflix's Bird Box seemed to be an exploration along the same vein. While the two 2018 releases are bound to be placed side-by-side due to their passing similarities, Bird Box is a completely different walk in the woods.

It's difficult to settle into Bird Box because it flutters between typical survival horror mechanisms and muddled allegorical sci-fi. This makes the audience feel just as blindfolded as to where Bird Box is going as the characters in the movie. It makes for a peculiarly entertaining ride -- strangely comical and fun at times, intensely horrifying in others but ultimately anchored in Sandra Bullock 's strong emotional presence on screen.

The Netflix-produced movie centers on Bullock as Malorie, a defiantly pregnant woman who is thrust into the chaos of a world plagued with unexplained mass suicides triggered by one look at an unseen presence. After going with her sister ( Sarah Paulson ) to a routine ultrasound appointment, they are soon surrounded by people affected by this terror, causing flaming car crashes and hysteria on their drive home.

Malorie's sister falls victim to the mysterious threat while she is driving them both, and loses her focus as her eyes are darkened when she sees it. Despite Malorie's efforts to gain control of the car, the sister crashes, and then commits suicide when she intentionally walks in front of bus. Amidst the turmoil, Malorie comes across a safe house full of survivors like herself who also managed to look away from the ominous presence that left the town in complete destruction. They all hide there.

Bird Box then leans into its horror elements as an unlikely bunch and talented cast members gather, including Moonlight 's Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich , Jacki Weaver, Rosa Salazar, Danielle Macdonald, Lil Rey Howery, Machine Gun Kelly and BD Wong . Together, they struggle to survive, work with one another and their numbers start to shrink as the presence follows closely outside their door.

Often, the Bird Box plot moves to a timeline five years ahead, where Malorie is a fearless survivor guiding two children through a river while wearing blindfolds, which later converges into the conclusion of the film. As the movie jumps back and forth between the past and the future, it's not difficult to loosely fill in the gaps of the fate of the other characters, but that's not to say watching the reveals isn't entertaining to discover.

However, what we're strapped into in the beginning of Bird Box doesn't quite match up with what happens next as the movie's intended "deeper meaning" is introduced though never completely explored to be completely grasped. Whether it's intended to be some sort of religious allegory, commentary on mental health or lazy attempt to move the story along --it feels unclear, and the movie suffers for it. However, it should be noted that Bird Box is based on a 2014 novel by Josh Malerman with the same title, and book adaptations can fall victim to feeling like they have missing pieces or are up to interpretation.

Additionally, it's tough to turn an eye to the overall weakness of Bird Box 's script that makes the concept come off as kind of comical at times when its intensity first starts to build. I mean much of the film has the characters wearing blindfolds and clumsily walking around -- it's tough to take it seriously the whole time because it's an inherently funny thing to watch.

I think this happens because at the beginning of Bird Box stumbles in establishing the world of the film through a quick news brief. From there, it suddenly places the characters in the world -- it tells when it should show, making it feel much more like the characters jumped on a Hollywood set than seamlessly flowing with the story being told. Then again, the threat itself cannot be seen, which allows the film to lose out on a big "horror factor" that has strengthened many entries in the genre.

The core of Bird Box 's story then falls to Malorie's story arc of being afraid to be a mother. It's an interesting and unique platform to explore parenthood , especially in an unsafe world where trust is often tested and survival is not guaranteed for anyone.

Because Bird Box juggles between an ambitious storyline and genre bending, it's packed from beginning to end with so much tension that you feel as exhausted, on-edge and empathetic with Malorie does by the end of her five-year journey trying to survive and keep two children alive from the deadly threat. While it's cinematically rocky and tonally unsound, there's payoff in the final act that had me all-in and unexpectedly emotional.

Bird Box 's greatest strength undeniably lies in the perfect casting of Sandra Bullock in the lead role. Her Malorie may have a tough, guarded exterior but she effortlessly carries the film so incredibly that you feel like you've just experienced the events along with her. Trevante Rhodes' character has a vulnerability about him that balances out Malorie's external shyness and adds heart and humanity to the film.

Bird Box is not trying to be A Quiet Place , while it some ways it should in the way it sometimes unsuccessfully builds tension and flips between being genres. But if you let it blindly spin you around, poke and pry for a while, once it's all uncovered, Bird Box is a memorable film.

Sarah El-Mahmoud has been with CinemaBlend since 2018 after graduating from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in Journalism. In college, she was the Managing Editor of the award-winning college paper, The Daily Titan, where she specialized in writing/editing long-form features, profiles and arts & entertainment coverage, including her first run-in with movie reporting, with a phone interview with Guillermo del Toro for Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water. Now she's into covering YA television and movies, and plenty of horror. Word webslinger. All her writing should be read in Sarah Connor’s Terminator 2 voice over.

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‘bird box’: film review | afi 2018.

Back in the spring, in A Quiet Place, the characters had to keep their mouths shut because the monsters had super-acute hearing. Now, seven months later, everyone has to wear blindfolds if they’re outside or else what they see will induce them to immediately commit suicide. Throw in a touch of George Romero and you have Bird […]

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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Back in the spring, in A Quiet Place, the characters had to keep their mouths shut because the monsters had super-acute hearing. Now, seven months later, everyone has to wear blindfolds if they’re outside or else what they see will induce them to immediately commit suicide. Throw in a touch of George Romero and you have Bird Box , a “class” horror film by virtue of star Sandra Bullock and art house director Susanne Bier but one that diminishes in joltage as the number of castmembers contracts. Premiered at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles, this is a wannabe shocker with a clever premise that doesn’t really get down and dirty or betray the base instincts of a born horror filmmaker.

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Netflix will offer this up as one of its holiday gifts Dec. 21.

The Bottom Line Not all it might have been.

Bier, whose 2010 Danish thriller In A Better World won the Oscar for best foreign language film, serves up an entirely dire world here, one in which people who are normal one minute go bonkers and kill themselves the next. No one knows what’s going on or why this is happening, but an early line of dialogue sums it up, even if it wouldn’t serve as the ideal advertising tagline: “If you look, you will die.”

In the resulting chaos, close to a dozen people wind up cloistered in a private home, hiding away and intent upon letting no more strangers inside. In the short time that they retain TV service, they learn that what’s happening locally is also occurring globally, so they’re trapped and must brace for an onslaught of zombies or whatever they are, just like the characters in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

One big difference, however, is that the mass attack on humanity is intercut with scenes of Bullock’s Malorie, some time in the future, guiding a small metal boat blindfolded, no less, down a wild river in the company of two little kids, who are similarly sight-deprived. Malorie’s level of sightless boating expertise may, in fact, be unprecedented, and certainly becomes so when they hit the rapids much later on. In any event, this signals that only these three will survive the pressure cooker of the house in which most of the action takes place.

The home in question is that of Douglas (John Malkovich), a hardliner who resents the intrusion of strangers, no good Samaritan he. All the same, the guests he tolerates for well over an hour of screen time represents a notably diverse group. Bullock’s Malorie is a loner and a painter whose sister Jessica (Sarah Paulson) may also be her closest friend. It won’t be too long before Malorie gives birth to her first child, and the same goes for the frightened Olympia (Danielle Macdonald, the star of Patti Cake$ ). Among the others seeking shelter are Tom (Trevante Rhodes), a young Iraq War vet who takes an interest in Malorie no matter her condition; Charlie (Lil Rel Howery), a most amiable young sci-fi writer; and Greg (BD Wong), very likely the sharpest person in the room.

When a number of the survivors safely make it to a local supermarket and have their way with what’s on the shelves, Douglas seriously proposes just staying there, as they’ll then have plenty to eat for a very long time. But even that is only a relative advantage, as food (and, more to Douglas’ needs, booze) will run out at some point and they’ll be prisoners in the house in the meantime.

The film does succeed in building a feeling of oppressive claustrophobia and a last-stand mentality; the idea that you will become contaminated and very shortly thereafter bring upon your own death merely by casting your gaze upon the world is a creepy one, to be sure. At a couple of points, however, evident exceptions to the rule pop up, grungy individuals who have somehow escaped automatic death in ways that remain unclear. The fate of the entire world similarly remains uncertain, although there is an echo of Fahrenheit 451 to the conclusion.

As has long been her wont, Bullock again portrays a strong woman who will not be denied, one who will move heaven and Earth and do whatever it takes to survive an arduous task demanding great endurance. It’s probably not coincidental that the screenwriter, Eric Heisserer, working from Josh Malerman’s 2014 novel, had previously written the female-centric sci-fi yarn  Arrival, which similarly held back information other writers might have felt compelled to provide.

Ultimately, no matter how high-minded a view of the material Heisserer and Bier may have held, this is deep-dish popular material that feels shortchanged in terms of suspense, scares and thrills. For her part, Bullock seems to have placed a foot in each camp, as she has done on occasion in the past, but she’s rather underserved by a writer and director perhaps uncertain about how to maximize the piece’s genre potential while simultaneously keeping it smart.

Salvatore Totino’s sharp cinematography represents a solid plus, but most helpful of all is the atypical, ominous and vastly mood-enhancing score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Venue: AFI Film Festival

Opens: Dec. 21 (Netflix)

Production: Bluegrass Films, Dylan Clark Productions, Chris Morgan Productions

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson, Jackie Weaver, Rosa Salazar, Danielle Macdonald, Lil Rel Howery, Tom Hollander, Colson Baker, BD Wong, Pruitt Taylor Vince

Director: Susanne Bier

Screenwriter: Eric Heisserer, based on the novel by Josh Malerman

Producers: Dylan Clark, Chris Morgan, Clayton Townsend

Executive producers: Sandra Bullock, Susanne Bier, Ainsley Davies, Alexa Faigen, Ryan Lewis, Eric Heisserer

Director of photography: Salvatore Totino

Production designer: Jan Roelfs

Costume designer :Signe Sejlund

Editor: Ben Lester

Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross

Casting: Mary Vernieu, Michelle Wade Byrd, Jina Jay

122 minutes

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Screen Rant

Bird box review: sandra bullock stars in netflix's the happening, bird box is a respectably moody and intelligent psychological thriller, if also a relatively muddled supernatural horror allegory..

The latest addition to Netflix's collection of original movies, Bird Box is an adaptation of the 2014 horror-thriller novel by Josh Malerman (of the rock band The High Strung). Universal optioned the film rights prior to the book's publication and even had IT helmer Andy Muschietti attached to direct at one point. The project later moved to Netflix, with Eric Heisserer ( Arrival ) writing the adapted script and Susanne Bier ( The Night Manager ) directing. Between its creatives and star Sandra Bullock, the film is pretty stacked with talent and makes for a (mostly) worthwhile genre movie. Bird Box is a respectably moody and intelligent psychological thriller, if also a relatively muddled supernatural horror allegory.

Bullock stars in Bird Box as Malorie Shannon, a modern painter who is preparing to give birth to her first child, despite only having her sister Jessica (Sarah Paulson) for support. One day, reports come in that people in Russia are committing mass suicide for no clear reason, which in turn inspires people in the U.S. to panic and start preparing for the event to reach North America. Malorie and Jessica are naturally alarmed by this, but assume they're safe for the time being and make their way to a local hospital for Malorie's scheduled checkup.

However, while they're at the hospital, people start committing suicide, and Malorie barely manages to escape and seek shelter at a house with several other people, including a wealthy fellow named Douglas (John Malkovich). Along with the others hiding there - like a gentle military veteran named Tom (Trevante Rhodes) - Malorie comes to realize that the seemingly supernatural entities responsible for all this can only hurt people if they look at them. Armed with that knowledge and not much else, it falls to Malorie, Tom, and the others to figure out a long-term solution to staying alive in this strange (and extremely dangerous) new world.

While there are shades of The Happening and The Road in Bird Box (which Malerman started writing before either film came out), the movie version also begs comparison to A Quiet Place  because of its similar use of atmosphere and shared themes about parenthood - more specifically motherhood, in Bird Box 's case. Overall, Bier's film is smarter and more carefully constructed than The Happening , but lacks the intricate world-building and attention to detail of A Quiet Place . Heisserer's script is also clever in the way it frames the scenes at Douglas' place with flash-forwards to Malorie's life in the post-apocalyptic world. While the film's circular narrative design doesn't bring out deeper layers of meaning to its story the same way Heisserer's Arrival screenplay and its own circular plot did, it does allow Bird Box to play out as a combination of two different survival thrillers for the price of one.

Bird Box 's monsters are similarly intriguing and unnerving, despite the film's habit of being somewhat wishy-washy about how they work and what they can and cannot do. The movie partly gets away with this simply because the creatures are meant to be fantastical (and, thus, cannot be fully understood), but it also diminishes the tension in certain sequences. Overall, though, Bier wrings a good deal of suspense out of the film's premise and creates some white-knuckle moments through subtly and implication, rather than in-your-face terrors (the movie's gory scenes aside). Bird Box further ratchets up the psychological horror factor with its cinematography, as Bier and DP Salvatore Totino ( Spider-Man: Homecoming ) focus the camera primarily on what the film's protagonists' can see, while offering little more than fleeting glimpses of what they cannot. The movie also benefits from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' characteristically unsettling score, during its louder scenes.

Cast-wise, Bird Box is a showcase for Bullock above all else, and the Oscar-winner rises to the occasion with a performance that's all the more compelling thanks to Malorie's arc from semi-disillusioned adult to full-blown warrior mom over the course of the story. Rhodes is equally sweet and sensitive in his role as Tom, and makes for a nice foil to Malkovich's unapologetically self-serving Douglas especially. The other characters here are never really fully developed and tend to represent ideas about how people would respond to the (quasi-literal) end of the world, as opposed to three-dimensional people. Bird Box 's supporting cast is loaded with strong talent (see: Rosa Salazar, Jacki Weaver, BD Wong, Tom Hollander, and so on), and they make the most of what they're given to work with here, all the same.

Like Heisserer and Bier's previous work, Bird Box use genre tropes to tell a story with distinct social, political, and even spiritual overtones. Unfortunately, the film sometimes struggles to balance its thriller elements with thought-provoking drama and conversations. As a result, Bird Box 's subtext can be messy or unclear and its larger commentary about the difference between survival and living (not to mention, its religious allusions) can come across as clunky and preachy, rather than organic to the story. Still, its messages are worthy of appreciation and the movie generally works as a parable about the experience of becoming a mother in a world that seems to grow increasingly dangerous by the day.

Bird Box is showing in select U.S. markets but, all things considered, it's not really a must-see on the big screen compared to the other films currently playing in theaters (or arriving before December draws to a close). However, since most people will probably be watching it on Netflix anyway, it's certainly worth a recommendation for anyone who's in the mood to stream it. It might not be as ground-breaking or innovative as other Netflix Originals, but there's something to be said for a perfectly sturdy horror-thriller (like Bird Box ) to close out what's been a pretty dang strong year for the genres overall.

Bird Box is now playing in select U.S. theaters and is streaming through Netflix. It is 124 minutes long and is rated R for violence, bloody images, language and brief sexuality.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

SCIFI for your WIFI

REVIEW: “Bird Box”

Netflix has not allowed the souring of its deal with Disney to stop it from going out into the world and discovering new talent to fill its streaming bandwidth. Today’s review talks about a new movie based on a novel called “Bird Box.”

Sensory Horror is Back

‘Sensory horror’ – a term I coined for monsters which can neither be seen or sensed by Humans OR that the creatures rely on their own superhuman senses to hunt Humans – with deadly consequences are not new.

Invisible monsters were a staple in the science fiction and horror genre, but our love of special effects has made them less relevant in recent years.

The Darkest Hour (2011) was the most recent film which featured monsters which were invisible to the naked eye and could only be revealed by environmental effects. Though the film is considered “B movie” fare, I liked it just the same. I dig the plucky Human stories fighting back against an irresistible alien force, even though I know we would be doomed in reality.

Netflix’s Bird Box, however, shares more in common with “The Happening” by M. Night Shyamalan released in 2008. The underlying premise was also the same; after the exposure to the invisible threat, Humans would begin randomly taking their own lives or the lives of others.

Bird Box is based on an award-winning story by writer/musician Josh Malerman, and expands our realm of invisible monsters with creatures we never see but are able to attack and rewrite the Human mind in a matter of seconds after exposure to the apparently invisible (to the movie viewer) threat.

But I’ve Seen This Movie Before

The film opens with the standard fare of Oscar-winner, Sandra Bullock (an actress I have little personal affinity for, but she is effective in this role) as a woman who is pregnant and having a tough time connecting with the idea she is pregnant and due to give birth sooner than she would like. Bullock is a talented artist who hides from the world for months at a time and is thus unaware of a phenomenon which began in Russia but is quickly sweeping the planet.

Like most pandemic films, the protagonists watch the news broadcast which tells them nothing and thus, they ignore it as news of another place, likely to not be news by dusk of the same day. Bullock as Malorie is visited by her sister, Jessica, portrayed by Golden Globe winner, Sarah Paulson, who lives life to the fullest, outgoing, fun-loving and supportive of her sister.

This unlikely pair are soon thrust into the usual driving scene panic such movies feel compelled to create where we see Humans at their worst, screaming and running, dying badly, and looking like a species barely worthy of the words: Intelligent life.

At this point in the movie, you know something’s wrong, but you aren’t sure what. The movie changes pace and becomes an indoor psychological drama as unlikely people are thrust together hiding from something they can’t see, scarcely believe in and have no information about.

Yes, you guessed it. Lots of meaningless dying takes place. Okay, there is a bit of meaning. We learn about how the creatures move, how they appear in the environment and as the movie progresses, we are switched back and forth from the past to the present, where Malorie has given instruction to two young children about five or six to inform them they were going on a journey to someplace safe from whatever it is that’s killing them.

The creatures never get a name, but we do get a few images drawn by an insane man and anyone familiar with Lovecraftian lore might recognize one or two of the monsters from the artistic renderings.

What I Liked About Bird Box

It explained nothing. It apologized for nothing. It killed everyone indiscriminately and in some cases, quite horribly. Yet, there is a distance being created in the deaths of the characters, one I can’t help but suspect is part of how Malorie, who is the disaffected protagonist, presents as her point of view.

John Malkovich, plays the irascible Douglas, a drunkard, bullying realist who has the only true sense of what is happening and his fatalism is infectious. He is one of the few characters who is able to bring any semblance of reality to this story.

Vivien Lyra Blair as Girl and Julian Edwards as Boy (the children of the two pregnant women in this film) stand out because they rarely get to speak and thus must deliver their their few lines with intensity and emotional resonance. Both manage this feat with professional aplomb. Being cute as buttons doesn’t hurt either.

Not All Of It Worked

It was so predictable. That isn’t a bad thing, but I think once you have seen enough of these kinds of movies, you can’t help but be able to predict, how it moves, what it does and how it ends. The movie manages to keep enough tension, especially when Malorie, Boy and Girl are trying to make it to a place of refuge down river. I felt that the movie included a lot of star power but didn’t have enough for them to do in order to exploit their acting range.

I gave the movie a 7 out of 10 because while it manages to keep my interest, it was unable to expand to any new ground beyond the hint of Lovecraftian madness due to the exposure of the creatures. It shocks in all the right places, it makes all the right moves, but it feels too much like pandemic/horror movies before it such as The Mist, World War Z, The Happening , and another personal favorite, The Crazies .

Room for Improvement

It’s not a bad movie. It lasts two hours and four minutes, which feels a bit long. If you’re a genre movie buff, you have the feeling you’ve seen it before, except maybe this one was a little bit better (or a bit worse).

If you haven’t seen any of those movies I mentioned, you might actually enjoy this one a little more than I did, but only because you haven’t seen anything else.

If there was anything I would have added, it might have been nice to understand what was actually happening. Yes, I mentioned the movie is good because it doesn’t explain anything but I’m one of those people who wants to know more. I guess I better go and read the book. Maybe I can get some closure there.

Bird Box also features: Trevante Rhodes as Tom, Jacki Weaver as Cheryl, Rosa Salazar as Lucy, Danielle Macdonald as Olympia, Lil Rel Howery as Charlie, Tom Hollander as Gary, Machine Gun Kelly as Felix, BD Wong as Greg, Pruitt Taylor Vince as Rick and Parminder Nagra as Dr. Lapham.

Production companies were: Bluegrass Films, Chris Morgan Productions and Universal Pictures.

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