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Bird Box (2018)
 
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Director:
Susanne Bier |
COUNTRY
USA |
GENRE
Thriller/Horror |
NORWEGIAN TITLE
Bird Box |
RUNNING TIME
124
minutes |
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Producer:
Dylan Clark
Chris Morgan
Clayton Townsend |
Screenwriter (based on the novel by Josh Malerman):
Eric Heisserer |
Review
With
Bird Box, one of the most talked about releases of 2018,
Susanne Bier has created a fine chiller from Josh Malerman's
best-seller. "There is no terror in the bang, only in the
anticipation of it," said Alfred Hitchcock, and Bier's greatest
merit in this adaptation is her choice of not visualizing the
unknown threat, leaving all the horror in the atmosphere and in the
viewer's imagination.
Bird
Box is basically a two-fold film, both in narrative, style and
tempo. The first part of the film (the flashbacks) is the most
effective. Here Bier creates a harrowing, intense climate as an
unseen spectacle which makes people inexplicable suicidal appears in
the city just as our protagonist Malorie (Sandra Bullock) and her
sister leave a clinic after a pregnancy check-up. The escalating
chaos sets the tone brilliantly, and as Malorie barricades herself
together with a number of other survivors inside a nearby house, the
film takes on a quality reminiscent of
I Am Legend.
There are fine performances (particularly from John Malkovich),
interesting discussions of existential proportions and for the most
part logical character actions in the following middle-part, before the film climaxes halfway through and moves back into the
present-day timeline; about Bullock, boyfriend and two children five
years later.
Unlike most horror movies dealing with the supernatural, Bird Box
very rarely cheats, and so we continue to care for these
characters, even when their situation seems increasingly hopeless and
the threat unfortunately becomes increasingly horror-film-like and stale. The ending has a certain freshness about it, but of
course it cannot quite fill the empty space left behind by
Malkovich.
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