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.
Sourse: newyorker.com
