With the overwhelming majority of Netflix films now being tossed into the ether without even the faintest of fanfare, it’s hard to remember just what a stir the streamer’s slick survival horror Bird Box caused back in December 2018. It was the platform’s first genuine blockbuster, racking up record views (it remains the fourth most watched film ever on Netflix) and becoming a shock pop culture phenomenon spawning countless memes and the dreaded, deranged Bird Box Challenge. Yet as loud as the chatter might have been at the time, it went quiet just as fast, talks of a sequel fading as star Sandra Bullock soon spoke of temporary retirement.
A barely visible cultural imprint and an uninterested leading lady be damned with the streamer hoping that almost five years later, enough people are able to remember a universe that most critics were happy to repress. For all of its viral bluster, Bird Box was a sorry, sloppy spin on A Quiet Place with a far less effective sense-based danger and never quite working as a horror, a fantasy, a family drama or a survival thriller, parroting the work of others without bringing any sense of distinctive personality of its own.
There’s a similar muddle in the mid-summer spin-off Bird Box: Barcelona, an attempt to expand the world of the first and appeal to the streamer’s considerable Spanish-speaking audience. It again wields ambition beyond its means and is similarly lacking in the thrills it seems to think it’s providing but it’s mostly rather watchable schlock, finding a surprisingly nifty way into the story. As one might have guessed, the action has moved from California to Barcelona, replacing Bullock with The Invisible Guest’s Mario Casas. We meet his beleaguered father Sebastián after the creatures have arrived and encouraged suicide upon those who dare to look.
There’s an intriguing first act reversal that murks Sebastián’s mission, curdling from mere survival into something far more troubling, and while it’s not always successfully crafted and sometimes clumsily explained, it shows that the writer-director duo Alex and David Pastor are invested in genuinely trying to do something different with the spin-off. The same raw elements remain – Sebastián eventually finds himself with a ragtag group of strangers, including Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell, as in the original – but the dynamic is different, the film shifting more focus on something that was less integral in the first, how some receive the visitors as a blessing rather than a curse. What the film has to say about the danger of religious fervor is admirably, and believably, bleak although its attempts to say something about the horror genre’s buzzword du jour – trauma – are less clear-eyed, words like grief and loss thrown up into the air, little care given to where they might land.
It feels nastier than the first and at times far more entertaining (the Pastors concoct some horribly efficient set pieces, one including a gnarly mass subway suicide is particularly successful) but without the anchor of Bullock and her utterly random yet ever-so-reliable supporting cast (from Moonlight’s MVP Trevante Rhodes to two-time Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver to a scenery-chewing Tom Hollander), it can also feel a little bit inconsequential. The problems that plagued the first movie are also, at times, even more niggling here, mostly in the cheaply ineffective visuals chosen to announce the presence of the creatures, worsened here by some angelic effects that look like they came from a micro-budgeted faith-based drama. It also suffers from the sequel curse of overexplaining something that’s best left unexplained, a character’s monologue about the quantum mechanics behind the monsters landing with a thud.
As a return to a world most of us had gladly forgotten about, it’s far better than it could have been, a simple retread transformed into something flawed but competently made and narratively unexpected, albeit mildly. With more cities to torture and more markets to appeal to, expect more spin-offs to come (the ending is clumsily geared toward more) but this is a box that Netflix would be wise to close sooner rather than later.
Bird Box: Barcelona is out now on Netflix
