Directed by Susanne Biers

Starring Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich

Fucking Birdbox. A movie who’s value is only pushed by the number of people seeing it. And being the fool that I am, I too was tricked into wasting 2 hours of my life on a worthless tale about…about what exactly?

A massive outbreak of suicides hit Europe. No one knows why. It spreads to the states. Sandra Bullock is pregnant, and paints in her free time to cope with loneliness. Her sister is Sarah Paulson. They don’t stop talking about horses. While at the hospital, people start going crazy. A woman in a brightly colored jacket smashes her face into the glass. Paulson sees something while driving them to safety, and, after crashing the car, walks into an oncoming car to kill herself.

Bullock stumbles around in empty shock. Everyone around her in panic. Everything is on fire. A lone baby stroller rolls into the street in some worthless wink at Battleship Potemkin.

Bullock ends up safe in some house with John Malkovich. And some randoms who also manage to get inside. What’s clear is this: if they open their eyes outside, they will die. We don’t see what they see, and we hear strange whispers when whatever it is that’s outside comes to take hold of them. So stay inside. Cover the windows. Blindfold everyone. Oh, and keep birds around. Birds know everything.

One of the people trapped in the house with them is Charlie, a grocery store employee who also knows everything. How does he know so much? Why, because he’s writing a novel. About the end of the world. And he’s played by Lil Rel Howery, the same great actor who was everyone’s favorite TSA agent in Get Out. If only the film paid half as much attention to its story as it did for Charlie.

Then there’s Tom (played by the actor in the third part of Moonlight), Bullock’s love interest. Malkovich is an angry, drunken neighbor of the person who owns the house they are trapped in. There’s some ludicrous lines about how he is currently suing them for changes they were making to their house, “because I have to see it”. Oh, the owner of the house is gay, and married. This is as close to political statements as we’re going to get people.

A trip to the grocery store, in a blacked out car. The GPS tells them where to go. You tell me how the roads are so clear in a post apocalyptic tale. They run over one body. And maybe tap into some pillar. The realism is astounding.

The movie begins five years into the future, where Bullock is with two children and preparing to row them down the river to apparent safety. And the screenwriter makes the giant mistake of having the movie cut back and forth between the initial outbreak and the future. You know everything that is going to happen in this movie from the first five minutes. And if you didn’t know, then Gary comes in to help you.

Death or the Devil, or any iteration of some demonic evil often manifests itself into psychical characters in movies and shows. In the very best, it’s an effective way to drive the story, and can be awesomely offsetting. In Birdbox, we have Gary. An older man who is let into the house by a pregnant woman (not Bullock) in almost secret, and against the wishes of Malkovich. Gary may be one of the worst actors of all time. Immediately, as what’s left of the runtime is dwindling, we know Gary is evil, and that everyone except Bullock and the kids will die. That is no spoiler. That is bad writing.

And what a perfect embodiment of everything that is wrong with this movie. Where it could be profound, it turns to stupid cliches. Almost, almost the movie has something to say. Because Gary talks about “the creatures from the Underwood”, an insane asylum, whose inhabitants are immune to the visions and sounds driving everyone crazy. Because they are already “crazy”.

But we can’t get too deep on such a complex issue, Gary has to kill everyone. Because people want a bad guy, and someone to root against. And how else to accelerate the plot than have someone come along and easily open all the windows and stab people with scissors. And why exactly doesn’t Tom grab that gun, the moment Malkovich tells him Gary put the birds in the freezer? The lamest contrivances. The most boring circumstances.

This is a horribly stupid movie. And worse, it didn’t have to be. There’s no way those birds make it alive out of the rapids. There’s just no way. And if Gary is the devil, then Rick must be god. Oh yes, a divinely kind voice of intervention on a radio line that hasn’t worked in five years, promising freedom and safety. I guess the birds are supposed to be a wink at The Grande Illusion. And those mentally ill people driving around them in circles told me the idiots who made this movie wanted to think they were as clever as Robert Mathison for I Am Legend, which may be the greatest book ever written. The movie has nothing to do with the book. But Birdbox might be winking at Robert Neville’s fate at the end of it. And how painful it was for to see it. And the ending with Bullock and the kids “almost” being tricked into taking off their blindfolds goes on, and ON, AND ON.

And where Rick is might be the most unintentionally stupid reveal we could have gotten. And Rick’s baldness just told me they wanted to give us some Charles Xavier vibes, except the X Men are now all blind. And Bullock looks up at the end in a similar way to Julianne Moore in the concluding shots of Blindess, which also was a despicable movie based on Saramago’s good book.

This is a waste of your time. What is it that people see and hear that’s making them kill themselves? Some theories online speculate it’s about the dangers of social media. Others say it’s about how white people refuse to see racism. I say you’re all idiots to even have thought past the end credits. This movie, like the stories Tom tells Bullock, and then the kids, is an empty parable. Any worthwhile message has been thrown out the window for dumb and boring cliches and superficial melodrama.

There’s that book, The King in Yellow, written by Robert Chambers, which contained short stories about people who read a play by the same name, and were driven insane by it. The serial killer in True Detective was named after it, and it ended up inspiring both Lovecraft and Stephen King. I’d like to think the characters in Birdbox had seen Birdbox, and were left with no choice but to kill themselves.