THE REEL: Bird Box

A poster of the movie "Bird Box", starring Sandra Bullock. PHOTO | COURTESY

What you need to know:

  • Bird Box is a Sci-Fi horror drama flick about an apocalyptic outbreak that is causing people to commit suicide.
  • The strange breeze seems to carry images and voices of deceased loved ones, making them so enticing that it makes people want to die.
  • Do you have feedback on this article? Please email: [email protected]

Saying there has been a lot of buzz around the movie Bird Box, which Sandra Bullock stars in, would be the greatest understatement of 2019 so far.

Social media has been awash with memes, plot spoilers and criticisms of the movie. Personally, I got roped in because some of the memes were too funny to not want to find out how they relate to the movie. I wanted to be on the inside of the jokes.

Bird Box is a Sci-Fi horror drama flick about an apocalyptic outbreak that is causing people to commit suicide. It revolves around Malorie (Sandra Bullock), who is pregnant when the wave of this strange self-harm-inducing plague first hits the US.

The strange breeze seems to carry images and voices of deceased loved ones, making them so enticing that it makes people want to leave this earth and join them in the after-life.

In a bid to get to safety, Malorie finds herself in a house with Tom (Trevante Rhodes), Douglas (John Malkovich), Felix (Machine Gun Kelly), Charlie (Lil Rel Howery), Greg (BD Wong), Lucy (Rosa Salazar), and Olympia (Danielle Macdonald), who is also pregnant.

If you’ve ever lived with housemates, then you definitely know that having people in close quarters, and sometimes in your personal space, is usually a recipe for some sort of disaster.

There are rules set in the house that are meant to keep them from being exposed to the outside and eventually their deaths, but it seems not everybody wants to follow the rules as stipulated.

SURVIVAL

The inhabitants start turning on themselves as they fight to keep their sanity and preserve their lives as the interior of this house becomes their whole world for quite some time. In the meantime, food is running out and there is also a side effect to the “suicide breeze” – it seems to have brought zombies of some sort with it.

Some people have compared the movie to A Quiet Place albeit calling it the “lesser” version. I, however, got vibes of M Knight Shyamalan’s The Happening, which also had a “possessed wind” situation going on.

I liked the fact that Bird Box is not told directly. A situation occurs in the “present time” and you’re then taken to a flashback that explains how we actually got here. The story is also suspense-filled and keeps you glued as you’re wondering just how or what happened, and whether our characters are going to get out of it.

I am yet to read the book but if the feeling that the book is always better than the movies is true, then this would be an amazing read.

Sandra Bullock is a seasoned actress and her performance here was just as stellar. She was nurturing in one scene, gun slinging in the next, and hacking away at zombies in another, all the while still holding the fundamentals of the character Malorie.

Malkovich’s character will get to the very end of your nerves as he tries to justify how being brush and rude has helped him get to the point being one of the few people left alive in the world. Lil Rel’s character Charlie is almost a mirror of the character he played in Get Out. Charlie is a hilarious and very practical African American character who would not dream of doing anything that would put him in harm’s way after finding the safety of the abode.

I found the score to be good, the hue suited the genre, and even the silences added to the allure of the movie. Of course, due to the horrific scenes, this would be a movie for someone who’s not squeamish or who is at least old enough not to have nightmares when they watch it.

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