‘Bird Box,’ with Sandra Bullock, has one good scene; after that, you can take a nap

Sandra  Bullock and Sarah Paulson in “Bird Box.” Photo: Netflix

The effort behind “Bird Box” was to make something better than a standard horror movie, but the result is dull and half-hearted. It’s not serious enough or important enough to transcend the horror genre, but neither is it visceral enough to hold up as a regulation horror movie.

This is what happens when an exceptional director goes slumming. Susanne Bier has made some extraordinary films in her native Denmark, most notably “After the Wedding.” And the early scenes of this movie, in which there is a sudden civil collapse, show such flair and innovation that one can see why she was inspired to give this a try. But no amount of intelligence or investment in the characters can pump up a two-hour movie that has a 90-minute patch of tediousness.

“Bird Box” is based on Josh Malerman’s novel, but the premise sounds a lot like that of “The Happening,” the 2008 film by M. Night Shyamalan. Out of nowhere people start killing themselves. In “The Happening,” a virus was the culprit. In “Bird Box,” it’s something else, but it has the same general effect – chaos, terror, confusion.

As the movie starts, it’s all taking place on the other side of the world, and so our pregnant heroine Malorie (Sandra Bullock) thinks, “Who cares?” It’s not her problem. With her sister (Sarah Paulson), she goes to a routine doctor’s appointment, and on the way out sees a woman banging and banging her head against the wall, hard, smashing her skull to pieces. This is where we and Malorie figure it out: “It’s happening here.”

Though it’s not worth paying for the privilege, if in six months you see “Bird Box” turn up on cable or on a streaming service, you might want to watch the first 10 minutes. Bier expertly calibrates the horror, so that over the course of a short ride home, things go from bad-but-manageable to dangerous, to calamitous, and finally to catastrophic. We watch as Bullock, one of the easiest of people to connect with onscreen, goes from thinking she’s having a normal day, to thinking she needs to get home fast, to realizing that life has just gotten horrendous, permanently.

To state the obvious, driving can be difficult if the other motorists are trying to kill themselves. But because not all suicides are equally shocking, Bier scores the scene so that the images escalate in horror. The most arresting moment to take from “Bird Box” is the sight of an entranced woman opening the door to a flaming car and going up in flames as she sits down in the passenger seat, as calmly as though she were getting into an Uber.

As we soon discover, the zombie-like suicides have a visual trigger, so it’s essential that the characters cover the windows or, if outside, keep their eyes closed. Malorie finds shelter in a big house with a group of other people, and it’s right around here that you can settle in for a long nap. Most of the rest of the movie takes place inside the house and involves a group of strangers trying to get along and survive in the face of a common menace. John Malkovich plays a cynic and a recent widower — his wife was the one who got into the flaming car. Trevante Rhodes plays a former soldier, who assumes a leadership role, etc.

The actors are fine, but the problem is that it’s hard to care about the interaction of the people inside, because nothing they do matters. Nothing is of any consequence, and we know this for sure because the movie keeps flashing forward five years, so that we see that the world situation will remain unchanged.

This is the difficulty in presenting audiences with a hopeless situation. Obviously, the characters’ challenges must be formidable; otherwise, they wouldn’t be interesting. But when they get to the level of hopelessness, audiences check out. They react in the way that Bullock does at the start of the movie to reports of chaos on the other side of the world: Too bad for them, but it’s somebody else’s problem.

K“Bird Box”: Horror thriller. Starring Sandra Bullock and Sarah Paulson. Directed by Susanne Bier. (R. 124 minutes.) Also on Netflix starting Dec. 21.



  • Mick LaSalle