![]() Within minutes, the strangers solve the basic concept of what’s killing the globe, voices overlapping like this horror film could, with one butler tuxedo, suddenly spin into a British farce with people barging in and out of the kitchen in high-pitched crisis announcing things such as: “We need toilet paper!” and “Don’t answer the door!” No one gets a backstory. When we meet them all, the camera bobs around like it’s just trying to count off that everyone’s in the room. These characters feel so crammed together and underwritten that they add up to almost nothing. And then there’s the exciting flavors, all upcoming actors seized while hot: Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes, Patti Cake$’s Danielle MacDonald, The Maze Runner’s Rosa Salazar, Get Out’s Lil Rel Howery as a grocery store worker who never strips off his polyester vest, and Machine Gun Kelly, poised to slither on to every hitlist after playing Tommy Lee in the Mötley Crüe biopic The Dirt. ![]() (His second, he admits, said hell “couldn’t be worse than being married to me”.) There’s the cult favorites such as Sarah Paulson and Jacki Weaver. There’s the classic crowd-pleasers such as Bullock and John Malkovich as an alcoholic crank who blames Mallory for the death of his third wife. The ensemble, too, feels as curated as a box of donuts. Tense sequences, like an early attempt to head out for food, are capped by clunky punchlines while the climax is almost guaranteed to get giggles, as though the puppeteers in charge accidentally screwed on that scene in The Wicker Man where Nicolas Cage screams about the bees. There’s good scenes and smart ideas, but overall, the movie mostly clomps. Bird Box’s pieces feel forcibly screwed together, a movie marionetted by strings of data code. Bier and her Netflix producers have made an algorithmic chiller that includes every trend from the sensory deprivation horror of Don’t Breathe and A Quiet Place to JJ Abrams’ mysterious monsters to thunderingly thematic sci-fi like Arrival, which screenwriter Eric Heisserer also penned. Sighs Mallory: “It’s going to feel like it’s going on for a long time.”īoy, does it. Now, she has to shepherd these kids out of their home, into a rowboat, and down a dangerous river – blindfolded. She’s outlasted the rest of her random roommates, a grab-bag of people who, like her, blundered into the first open door the morning most of the planet got massacred, a baby carriage rolling down the street as though Bird Box wants Battleship Potemkin to make room. She’s spent five years surviving this plague-beast-Armageddon-whatsit, most of them trapped in this house. Two small children stare back in silent fear. ![]() “If you look, you will die,” Mallory orders.
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