The Spanish spinoff to Netflix’s 2018 hit Bird Box loses Sandra Bullock and gains twists, but feels too much like The Last of Us and A Quiet Place.
As a horror movie, Netflix’s Bird Box spinoff Bird Box Barcelona faces some stiff competition for its particular niche. While the original Bird Box, which made Sandra Bullock a bona fide Netflix star, may have actually benefited from dropping later in the same year as the remarkably similar hit The Quiet Place, Bird Box Barcelona arrives five years later after a wave of horror stories with similar dynamics — The Last of Us chief among them. And while the new film expands the world of Bird Box in some small but intriguing ways, it’s hard to watch it without hearing the echoes of all the other recent stories where a beleaguered dad type tries to protect a preteen kid in a post-apocalyptic world packed with low-level but profoundly lethal monsters.
Bird Box Barcelona takes place at roughly the same time as Bird Box, but follows what happens in Europe when mysterious monsters arrive and society collapses. (It also leaves all the Bird Box characters behind, and has nothing to do with Malorie, the sequel to the Josh Malerman horror novel that the first movie adapts.) Just as in Bird Box, a wave of sudden violent suicides heralds the arrival of creatures that most people can’t bear to look at — one glimpse of them causes psychosis, and for most people, immediate self-destruction. (Like Bird Box, the new film takes the extremely wise tack of keeping those creatures entirely off screen.) Survivors, including widowed engineer and father Sebastián (Mario Casas), wear blindfolds or blacked-out goggles if they have to go outside to forage in the nearly deserted city.
And like Bird Box, the new film mines plenty of anxiety out of the specter of people having to contend with unknowable monsters while blind, and plenty of horror out of the inventive, grotesque ways they kill themselves if they do spot one of the creatures.
