Bird Box Wants to Kill You

Netflix says that at least 45 million people saw Bird Box in its first week. If they’re not lying, they’re criminals–they just confessed to wasting the equivalent of 146 human lifetimes. In a just world, I wouldn’t even review this movie–it’s just a A Quiet Place knock-off, like those Transmorphers straight-to-DVD movies that only get made to grift gift-shopping grandmas. The only difference is that the producers of that garbage don’t pretend not to be hacks, while Bird Box was slapped together by people I had sincerely believed knew better.

At its core, Bird Box has nothing but contempt for you. It thinks that you’re the dumbest person it has ever met and is so focused on condescendingly leading you by the nose (because it’s worried that you’ll get lost if it lets go for even a second) that it doesn’t look where it’s going and tumbles down a ravine to its death. The rapids are dangerous, especially for children. How do I know? Because the movie tells you five separate times. Why do they lug around the eponymous Box of Birds when they do not actually do anything, other than get stuffed in a freezer? Shush, little one, you’re interrupting storytime.

Because of the harebrained decision to start this “horror” movie in medias res, you know within the first fifteen minutes that every other character you meet is going to die, and so you shouldn’t care. Not that you would care anyway, because the characters are so paper-thin that you couldn’t even use them to cover up the windows of their safehouse (which is just as devoid of personality as they are). And yet, somehow, Bird Box manages to bungle characters this underwritten. Why would the male lead, whose only trait besides “was in the army” is “sure is a fan of pregnant people” be fine with co-parenting a pair of kids for five years without once bothering to give them names?

But it would be a waste of breath to talk about everything this movie does wrong, in that I’d run out of breath and then Netflix’s kill count would hit 147. If there’s one thing that Bird Box does with a modicum of finesse, it’s to imply that the protagonist seriously considers killing a young girl as some kind of postmortem revenge against her mother. Not even A Quiet Place made me like A Quiet Place this much.