Review of Bird Box (2018) by Andrewburge — 22 Jan 2019

It seems to me that Netflix is starting to understand and decipher the personality of most of their viewers. These are not people who care about the art of cinema, but middle-to-upper class modern, trendy millennials and/or people who have a fetish of playing a streaming service in the background while having sexual intercourse because, for some reason, that is cool--"Netflix and chill" anyone?

So, in comes "Birdbox" directed by Susanne Bier. This follows the perfect recipe for satisfying the mass. It is a shallow, easy-to-follow post-apocalyptic survival flick but with a twist so that after watching it, the entitled pretentious viewers can again pat themselves on the back and think they are knowledgeable about the art just because they enjoyed a film so laughingly trying to be deep, that the evil entities are not even shown. Ever! "Wow! What an abstract avant-garde piece of revolutionary art"--tweets Carol, from her iPhone, feeling pretty good about herself. But in truth, this is nothing more than Jackass (except not funny).

There is no insight into anything. Those presences causing everyone suicide are never revealed to us, nor they are mentioned. This would be fine, if the film would actually do something with this mystery. Instead, it tells us that it is so in-depth, so complex, so multi-layered that dude, like, we won't even show them, but wait not even mention them, and you know the two kids in the film? They have no name--they are simply called "boy" and "girl". "This is something else"--says Carol; "This is a shameless cash-grab"--I say while struggling to shake-off the modernist cringe.

Every single one of these characters is as shallow as he or she can be and every single interaction is linear and boring; not to even mention the predictability of the whole thing. For its entire run-time, I was waiting for each character to inevitably die. This film is about as complex as a classic zombie-horror flick, except there they actually put the effort into the zombies, while here they do nothing and just put some lazy pretentious mumbo-jumbo.

In the end, what makes this a revolting film (if I could even call it that) is the fact that I do not think this shallowness is unintentional. Netflix is all about business, and here they completely killed the art form and, like the creatures in the film, replaced it with a populous void. Profitable, but disgusting.