Trevante Rhodes ( Moonlight) is second lead, but his character really just boils down to ‘decent man’. She is the only actor who gets a full character to work with. Bullock makes clear that Malorie is overcompensating for her fear, or acting like a cold-hearted survivor to try to keep herself from falling apart. The focus is much more on people’s reaction to the presence of the monsters, rather than on the monsters themselves.

While the film is creepy it’s not really scary. Susanne Bier ( The Night Manager) keeps her direction calm and clear. We then jump between timelines of Malorie with those hectored children and Malorie and a small band of survivors trapped in a house working out what on earth is going on and how they might survive it.

On their drive home they see chaos, as people deliberately crash their cars, throw themselves into fires and in other miscellaneous ways end their lives, under the power of some unseen force. It then cuts to five years earlier, with Malorie unexcitedly pregnant and on a doctor’s visit with her sister, Jessica (Sarah Paulson). It begins quite spectacularly with Malorie (Bullock) shouting at two children to obey her every word or they’ll die. Where A Quiet Place presented aliens that would kill you if you spoke, Bird Box gives us aliens who will drive you to kill yourself if you look at them, so instead of keeping your voice down you have to keep your eyes covered. It’s even more similar to A Quiet Place, with a twist on the same gimmick. It has shades of Annihilation, in its surreal mood, largely unexplained alien creatures and a team turning on each other as danger heightens. Bullock is more than enough reason to watch, and just one part of a luxuriously good cast, even if the film itself is scrabbling through very familiar post-apocalyptic alien ground.īird Box is immediately redolent of two other, better, 2018 movies. Indeed, it’s grabbed so much attention that the film was seen by over 45 million Netflix customers in a week. A star of her size popping up on your Netflix menu, in a film you’ve never heard of, grabs your attention. Were it not for the presence of Sandra Bullock, Bird Box might have passed by with very little attention.

Bird box tom hollander