Netflix’s ‘Bird Box’ Is Something You Can’t Unsee

Netflix’s Bird Box (2018), which was based on the eponymous book by Josh Malerman, has a plot that revolves around desperate people covering their eyes and ears to prevent seeing a mysterious thing that, when they do see it, will fill them with the uncontrollable urge to kill themselves. Perhaps Bird Box is genius, because it genuinely filled this reviewer with sympathy for the film’s characters stuck in this predicament.

I say this because viewing this movie made me want to kill myself for the entirety of its laborious run time.

I say this because I also wanted to cover my ears and eyes to avoid seeing something that made me want to kill myself.

I say this because I like the characters in the film, and I felt like I was at the whim of a force I would never understood.

Was that the point of this film? Was Bird Box’s ultimate goal to be so deliberately unwatchable that I understood Sandra Bullock’s character and urgently sighed with relief when she stared into camera and commanded, “Don’t look!” Or when she quietly whimpers to her children in a pivotal moment that “someone has to look.” I, watching the film for review, felt her pain. Someone has to look, but why, God, does it have to be me?

There’s not a single original moment in the entire film. The performances by heavyweights like Sandra Bullock, Sarah Paulson, John Malkovich, and new genre darling Lil Rel Howery are not enough to save characters so wooden and allergic to subtlety that they’re more appropriate for cutscenes in the Dead Rising series. Performances by cardboard cutouts like Machine Gun Kelly further push the film into the roiling swamp of bad movies like The Happening (2008) and Skyline (2010).

Speaking of The Happening, hasn’t this been done already? Did M. Night Shyamalan prove that inexplicable epidemic suicide isn’t scary? Every time I’ve looked at my wrist and thought about the river, it’s been about how that was terrifying, not the mystery box bullshit of why.

For a movie that deals with the importance of connection in a ruined world, there is The Battery (2012). For a movie that deals with a pseudo religious reckoning, there is The Mist (2007). For a movie that deals with an unsettling, unexplained end to humanity, there’s still The Birds (1963).

Perhaps the sinister creatures in Bird Box are showing the characters in the movie pages from scripts of other movies that have done what this film is doing, but first and better.

If that’s the case, I’d kill myself, too.

There’s a moment in Bird Box, when someone demands that people open their eyes and show their infant child the creatures’ vision.

“Show the baby,” he cries.

Don’t show the baby. And, if they know what’s good for them, definitely don’t show the baby a single second of Bird Box.