![]() That movie has far more of a sense of discovery and mystery. But even so, there’s a “been here, done this” quality to everything that happens in Bird Box Barcelona that doesn’t just come from the way it echoes the original Bird Box. ![]() And maybe, the film suggests, not being able to trust other people is as frightening and tragic as not being able to trust your own eyes.Ĭasas’ performance as Sebastián is well textured, and it’s easy to buy into his frustration as he navigates an unsafe world with a daughter he loves. The new movie also spends more time than Bird Box on exploring “Seers,” the comparatively rare people who react to the sight of the creatures not with suicide, but by becoming obsessed with looking at them - and forcing every other survivor they encounter to look at them too, regardless of how many die.Īll of which leaves Bird Box Barcelona with a message that’s also familiar from an awful lot of post-apocalyptic stories: Maybe humanity is the real monster. Screenwriters David and Àlex Pastor heavily imply that the monsters (described by various characters as angels, aliens, or something else entirely) are actively malign and capable of deceiving human minds, and that they’re somehow invested in whether people die. The dynamic in this movie starts to feel awfully familiar, especially when the film itself centers on the same events happening over and over: Characters flee the creatures, are exposed to them anyway, and die in grotesque ways.īird Box Barcelona adds a few new key wrinkles to the original film’s formula. Like The Last of Us, like the first Quiet Place, like Sweet Tooth or The Road or parts of Station Eleven and The Walking Dead, even like The Mandalorian, Bird Box Barcelona focuses heavily on the emotions of a dad figure straining to be responsible and capable under extraordinary circumstances that repeatedly threaten a young charge. ![]() As Sebastián and his daughter Anna (Alejandra Howard) wander through the wreckage of Barcelona, the people they meet are suspicious, on edge, and sometimes outright violent. ![]() (Like Bird Box, the new film takes the extremely wise tack of keeping those creatures entirely off screen.) Survivors, including widowed engineer and father Sebastián (Mario Casas), wear blindfolds or blacked-out goggles if they have to go outside to forage in the nearly deserted city.Īnd like Bird Box, the new film mines plenty of anxiety out of the specter of people having to contend with unknowable monsters while blind, and plenty of horror out of the inventive, grotesque ways they kill themselves if they do spot one of the creatures. (It also leaves all the Bird Box characters behind, and has nothing to do with Malorie, the sequel to the Josh Malerman horror novel that the first movie adapts.) Just as in Bird Box, a wave of sudden violent suicides heralds the arrival of creatures that most people can’t bear to look at - one glimpse of them causes psychosis, and for most people, immediate self-destruction. And while the new film expands the world of Bird Box in some small but intriguing ways, it’s hard to watch it without hearing the echoes of all the other recent stories where a beleaguered dad type tries to protect a preteen kid in a post-apocalyptic world packed with low-level but profoundly lethal monsters.īird Box Barcelona takes place at roughly the same time as Bird Box, but follows what happens in Europe when mysterious monsters arrive and society collapses. While the original Bird Box, which made Sandra Bullock a bona fide Netflix star, may have actually benefited from dropping later in the same year as the remarkably similar hit The Quiet Place, Bird Box Barcelona arrives five years later after a wave of horror stories with similar dynamics - The Last of Us chief among them. As a horror movie, Netflix’s Bird Box spinoff Bird Box Barcelona faces some stiff competition for its particular niche.
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