No one can say what the creatures are or find a way to fight them, since even a brief glance at them destroys the viewer’s mind. The afflicted murder everyone around them, or self-destruct in horrific ways. From somewhere, “creatures” arrive, and everyone who looks at them goes insane. The rush to action is only the first of many aspects of Malorie that makes it feel as much like a screenplay for a Bird Box movie sequel as a novel in its own right.īird Box lays out a normal world turned abnormal in an instant. Malorie continues the Bird Box story, but skips past any sense of setup to lunge into that moment where the protagonists’ world collapses and they’re dumped back into urgent, severe danger. When Susanne Bier’s film adaptation, starring Sandra Bullock, came out on Netflix and rapidly became one of the service’s all-time top 10 most-watched movies, a sequel seemed inevitable. There isn’t much drama in survivors sitting hunkered down in a secure place for long periods, unless they bring that drama into their cloisters with them.Īuthor Josh Malerman clearly understands this dynamic, but it’s still startling both how rapidly and how often he puts it into effect in Malorie, the sequel to his 2014 horror novel Bird Box. The cycle can go on endlessly, as long as the audience is willing to tune in, but over time, it can become maddeningly repetitive. It’s just a shitty, disappointing Netflix sequel.Anybody who’s watched or read The Walking Dead knows the familiar beats of a long-running story set in an ongoing apocalypse: the protagonists find safety, lose it to catastrophe, then struggle to find new safety, only to lose that again as well. It’s sort of framed as nefarious because it involves torturing Seers, but it also raises the Last of Us question: Is it acceptable to sacrifice one for the future of humanity? Unfortunately, Bird Box: Barcelona is not Last of Us. In a nutshell: Sebastian manages to resist his visions just enough to sacrifice himself and kill Padre Esteban so that Claire and Sofia can reach the castle safely.īut there’s a twist! Claire discovers that, although the castle is safe from the monsters, they’re conducting experiments on Seers in order to find a cure, and these experiments involve one of the creatures that the castle has trapped. They’re trying to find safety in a castle community, only to get there they have to navigate around Sebastian, who is also being manipulated by another Seer, Padre Esteban (Leonardo Sbaraglia). Meanwhile, Claire (Georgina Campbell) and Sofia (Naila Schuberth) are essentially this movie’s equivalent of the mother and child in the original Bird Box. Sebastian even forces open one woman’s eyes because he thinks he’s saving her. A lot of injured people on the bus open their eyes and die. For instance, he befriends a group of people who live on a bus, and while they are sleeping, he drives the bus out into the open and crashes it. Sebastian thus believes he is an angel, tasked with forcing others to open their eyes to the creature. Having lost his wife and daughter, he experiences visions of his daughter Anna (Alejandra Howard), who convinces Sebastian that viewing the monster is a good thing for others because it frees their souls. ![]() Case in point: Sebastian (Mario Casas) is a seer. A seer who witnesses the monster does not end their life, but he does lose his mind. ![]() The same premise applies in Barcelona - and many, many people throw themselves off buildings or smash their heads through windshields - but there are now exceptions: Seers. Blind people had a distinct advantage as they could not see. The only way a person could prevent their own demise was to never open their eyes while outside. In the original Bird Box, if a person opened their eyes and saw the creature/beast/apparition, the person would immediately take their own life, often in creatively unsettling ways. To its detriment, however, it expands the mythology in questionable ways. To its credit, albeit begrudgingly, it is not just Bird Box set in a different country. ![]() Three languages are spoken (English, Spanish, and German), it’s set in Barcelona, and - worst of all - it seems to herald the beginnings of a Bird Box universe. Bird Box: Barcelona feels more like the mockbuster we thought Bird Box might be: a cheaply made sequel designed to broaden the appeal of the original movie internationally. So, of course, Netflix had to take it further. However, it was surprisingly spooky and entertaining, skating on its high-concept premise and the talents of Sandra Bullock. Released about six months after A Quiet Place, it felt like something akin to a mockbuster, a straight-to-streaming rip-off of the John Krasinski film. It is also one of the few Netflix original movies that’s actually decent (not spectacular, but decent). ![]() The original Bird Box was the most-watched Netflix original movie of all time at one point, although it has since fallen to number three.
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