52 Films by Women Vol 4. 7. BIRD BOX (Director: Susanne Bier)
The anti-social media metaphor is mangled in the film
version, adapted by Eric Heisserer (Arrival) and directed by Susanne
Bier (In a Better World, TV’s The Night Manager). The villains are
individuals who, having not been driven to suicide owing to their own atypical
mental condition, force others to look into the light and therefore succumb to
madness. What drives their compulsion to kill? Neither Heisserer nor Bier makes
this clear. My guess is these maniacs are a metaphor for click bait: they drive
the unsuspecting person to look at something hidden behind a provocative
headline (‘you won’t believe how ‘x’ looks now’). By looking at the world –
really looking at it – people in the movie go mad. They have a death wish,
which is exactly where unfiltered behaviour in cyberspace can take you.
It cannot be lost on Netflix, the streaming subscriber
service funding Bird Box – claiming incidentally 45 million people watched it
in its first seven days of availability – that the film deals with the fear of
too much information. If people exercise caution as to what they allow
themselves and their children to see – as evidenced here – they might not
subscribe to Netflix or indeed watch a film like Bird Box. Then again if
something promises to be terrifying, it generates a counter-intuitive impulse
to open the box, Pandora-style, with all the evils and miseries contained
within it being released into the world. Cue maniacal laughter.
Netflix’s trump card is the participation of Sandra Bullock,
one of the biggest box-office stars of the 1990s with hits such as Speed
(1994), While You Were Sleeping (1995) and A Time to Kill (1996) who
unlike her contemporaries maintained a level of success in the following two
decades in the films The Proposal, The Blind Side (both 2009), The Heat and Gravity
(both 2013) as well as Miss Congeniality (2000) and its
2005 sequel – her winners tend to come in pairs. Bullock is at her best when
playing characters driven by grit and determination. She is too self-conscious
to play a character who disparages other women. She will often take roles that
require her to be aloof or socially-disconnected, though her turn in The
Blind Side as a mother who adopts a homeless African-American teen who
subsequently becomes an NFL [American] football star was a notable exception.
In Bird Box, she returns to her
socially-disconnected persona. Malorie is an artist who is several months
pregnant but has no interest in being a mother. Her partner has left her.
Malorie would rather remain in her studio, sending her sister, Jessica (Sarah
Paulson) to fetch her groceries. (‘Oh my God, you have nothing in the fridge,’ she
cries as if we didn’t notice.) Jessica makes sure Malorie turns up for her
sonograms. Sensing her dolour, her paediatrician, Dr Parham (Parminder Nagra,
the actress most likely to be typecast on television as a doctor, see ER,
Alcatraz
and Fortitude)
gives her a leaflet promoting adoption.
Initially, Malorie doesn’t believe in the panic induced by
the suicide outbreak in Russia – Jessica tells her about the mad rush to bulk-buy
water. However, she is alarmed at the hospital by a woman who starts banging
her head against a glass window. There is chaos in the street and Jessica
succumbs, causing her car to crash with Malorie in it.
Malorie finds herself outside a house where Lydia (Rebecca
Pidgeon) invites her in. Lydia’s husband, Douglas (John Malkovich) is dead set
against it. Fortunately, it is not his house. It belongs to an architect, Greg
(B D Wong) who Douglas is suing. He lets her inside as Lydia succumbs to The
Sight.
I call it The Sight, but we don’t really know what is
driving folks mad. Bier’s effects team render it as leaves floating in the air
and whispers spoken in the voices of people closest to you (the influencers).
At any rate, Douglas blames Malorie for his wife’s death. He is also quietly
impressed, when the occasion demands it, that Malorie, raised by a self-centred
cowboy, can handle a shot gun.
The architect’s house is filled with the disparate cast of a
medium-sized disaster movie. There’s Tom (Trevante Rhodes), who has four
sisters and has seen a lot of pregnancies. There’s Cheryl (Jacki Weaver), whom
we know very little about, though she can convincingly silence Douglas –
Weaver’s specialism in playing menacing moms (Animal Kingdom, Widows)
proves useful. Charlie (Lil Rel Howery) is a writer who is fascinated by the
end of days – he has done a lot of research for his book. He also works in a supermarket.
Then there is a pair of youngsters, Felix (Colson Baker) and police cadet Lucy
(Rosa Salazar) who will almost certainly get together even though Lucy says
‘never in a million years’.
Bier and Heisserer grab your attention from the outset with
Malorie’s ‘do exactly as I say’ speech addressed to the two young children,
named Boy (Julian Edwards) and Girl (Vivien Lyra Blair). The speech establishes
the rules: hold on to my hand, keep your blindfolds on and don’t eat after
midnight – well, not the last one, that’s from Gremlins. Malorie doesn’t
cover the ‘what happens if I want to pee’ eventuality. The action then flashes
back to five years earlier to Malorie in her studio using, one has to say, too
much black. Both the director and writer keep our attention with a series of
testing events, such as another pregnant woman, Olympia (Danielle Macdonald)
hammering on the door begging to be let in. Douglas says no, but it is Malorie
who is holding the shotgun.
Some plot developments are inevitable. The gang run out of
food so they have to go to the supermarket. You would think it would close for
apocalyptic end-of-days scenarios and indeed it does, but our man Charlie has a
set of keys. This leads to a shopping trip in which they mustn’t look out of
the window. Thank goodness for satellite navigation. Amazingly it still works –
those space satellites monitoring everything on Earth must be on Duracell (TM)
batteries. When they get to the store having briefly been surrounded by a
malevolent force that doesn’t validate parking, they dash into the building,
each shopping according to their needs – Douglas heads for the spirits section,
praising his companions for ‘making the end of the world great again’. Oh, Mr
Malkovich – such barmy banter! Malorie is a far more sensible shopper but then
there is a mad person in the storage room. Charlie knows him. ‘They say he has
some kind of mental condition but I always thought he was all right,’ Charlie
explains in a speech that returns to bite. The attempt to let the guy out ends
in clean-up on aisle five.
Cutting, as the novel does, between two time periods, we see
Malorie and the two children deal with unwanted attention from a guy on the
river who wants them to take off their blindfolds. ‘You kids look hungry,’ he
adds sweetly. Malorie may not have been on blind dates, but she is a crack
blind shooter at a man whom she is convinced means her harm.
Having mostly survived the shopping trip, Malorie and the
gang receive another visitor, an Englishman (Tom Hollander) who doesn’t appear
to be a religious zealot. He witnesses the birth of Olympia and Malorie’s two
children – but there’s a cost.
Demonstrating that this is a movie about the survival of the
most photogenic, Malorie and Tom get it together. Inter-racial kissing is
perfectly acceptable on streaming services. But there are blank sedans with
blacked out windows that tear down the streets. Their passengers are
malevolent.
The point at which past and present meet features some real
movie star action. Malorie and the children head for a community, using birds
that Malorie picked up in the supermarket to detect the sinister unseen force –
they are modern day canaries in a coalmine. The big problem is the rapids. One
of them has to look; Malorie chooses Girl, Olympia’s daughter.
Is Sandra Bullock really playing a bad mom? I’ll leave that
you for to discover. Budgeted at $19.8 million, Bird Box is Bier’s most
successful American film to date. It is still not a patch on her Danish work
co-scripted by Anders Thomas Jensen (In a Better World, A
Second Chance) which focuses on bad choices made by her protagonists.
Bier is responsible for the period drama Serena that barely scraped $100,000
at the American box office in spite of the ‘power’ pairing of Jennifer Lawrence
and Bradley Cooper. She also helmed Things We Lost in the Fire starring
two Oscar winners, Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro, but not in a film that many
people wanted to see. If Bier’s cinema has a recurring theme it is ordinary
people being thrust into dark worlds. That said, there is a lot of affection
for her 2013 romantic nuptial drama Love is all You Need starring Trine
Dyrholm and Pierce Brosnan. The problem with Bird Box is that it
begins with social commentary but descends into a monster movie, one in which
the threat is never seen. It flirts with but doesn’t tackle how people succumb
to bad judgment. It feels as compromised an American film as any product from a
Hollywood studio, though on a moment-by-moment basis, we are gripped.
Reviewed at Curzon
Victoria, Central London, Screen Three, Thursday 27 December 2018, 11:45am
screening
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