Bird Box

Maybe it was called 'A Quiet Area (but without vision)' a little too quickly and harshly merely because it had a roughly comparable high-concept premise. It's a promising adaptation of Josh Malerman's 2014 novel of the same name, but it may eventually suffer from failing to match up to John Krasinski's game-changing horror narrative tonally and philosophically.

Bird Box owes more to the old George A. Romero harsh and brutal "end of the world" flicks with adversarial survivors than it does to A Quiet Place's simpler monster premise, with a slow burning, if at times unnecessarily simplistic plot.

Malorie, a hesitant, single parent, has given little attention to what will happen to her following the birth of her unwanted kid. When her frightened sister (Sarah Paulson, in a disappointingly brief appearance) presses her to go to a prenatal visit, the two become engulfed in the mayhem when a strange entity begins killing people. Malorie is trapped inside with a gang of strangers, including a savvy construction worker (Trevante Rhodes) and a cantankerous, bad-mannered drunk (John Malkovich), and she has no choice but to rely on them if she and her pregnant child are to survive the end of the world.

Sandra Bullock reappears five years later in a superbly calibrated performance as a woman who has learned to rely completely on her survival instincts and pragmatic nature without losing her compassion. Malkovich, for his part, is marvellously caustic and perfectly petulant as a glass-half-empty type for whom the apocalypse serves to prove that his misanthropy was the right option all along.

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer can build a screenplay that analyses the effect of the events on his struggling survivors by following two parallel narratives that move us back and forth between the immediate aftermath of the tragic events and a few years into the future, but with mixed effects.

Malorie has managed to cope with the terrors of what lies ahead for her and the two children she is attempting to save. We sense she sees the world as an unforgiving place where it pays not to get too attached to anyone, despite her refusal to even give the five-year-old a name.

Bier does an excellent portraying the catastrophe as a very unpleasant, confining, and hopeless experience, opting to depict a world in which survivors are far more likely to die at the hands of one another than to be concerned about what awaits them outside. Bird Box, on the other hand, fails to add anything unique to the post-apocalyptic genre by presenting a clearly constructed dystopian tale in which each character behaves precisely as you would expect them to.