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Bird Box (2018)

Director:
Susanne Bier
COUNTRY
USA
GENRE
Thriller/Horror
NORWEGIAN TITLE
Bird Box
RUNNING TIME
124 minutes
Producer:
Dylan Clark
Chris Morgan
Clayton Townsend
Screenwriter (based on the novel by Josh Malerman):
Eric Heisserer


Cast includes:

CHARACTER ACTOR/ACTRESS RATING
Malorie Hayes Sandra Bullock
Tom Trevante Rhodes
Cheryl Jacki Weaver
Douglas John Malkovich
Jessica Sarah Paulson
Lucy Rosa Salazar
Olympia Danielle Macdonald ½
Charlie Lil Rel Howery
Gary Tom Hollander
Felix Machine Gun Kelly
Greg BD Wong
Rick Pruitt Taylor Vince
Girl Vivien Lyra Blair
Boy Julian Edwards

 

Review

With Bird Box, one of the most talked about releases of 2018, Susanne Bier has created a fine chiller from Josh Malerman's best-seller. "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it," said Alfred Hitchcock, and Bier's greatest merit in this adaptation is her choice of not visualizing the unknown threat, leaving all the horror in the atmosphere and in the viewer's imagination.

Bird Box is basically a two-fold film, both in narrative, style and tempo. The first part of the film (the flashbacks) is the most effective. Here Bier creates a harrowing, intense climate as an unseen spectacle which makes people inexplicable suicidal appears in the city just as our protagonist Malorie (Sandra Bullock) and her sister leave a clinic after a pregnancy check-up. The escalating chaos sets the tone brilliantly, and as Malorie barricades herself together with a number of other survivors inside a nearby house, the film takes on a quality reminiscent of I Am Legend. There are fine performances (particularly from John Malkovich), interesting discussions of existential proportions and for the most part logical character actions in the following middle-part, before the film climaxes halfway through and moves back into the present-day timeline; about Bullock, boyfriend and two children five years later.

Unlike most horror movies dealing with the supernatural, Bird Box very rarely cheats, and so we continue to care for these characters, even when their situation seems increasingly hopeless and the threat unfortunately becomes increasingly horror-film-like and stale. The ending has a certain freshness about it, but of course it cannot quite fill the empty space left behind by Malkovich.

Copyright © 31.03.2019 Fredrik Gunerius Fevang

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