Bird Box (Susanne Bier, 2018)

Ah, another European film director whose career has gone downhill for years takes the Tinseltown zloty to make a big-budget sci-fi film. Hollywood is really running out of apocalypse scenarios by now, and the suicidal mass hysteria communicated by eye contact here has the sense of dredging the bottom of the barrel. This might not be the case if the pandemic could be used to serve better as a metaphor for the pernicious blight of viral media, or if something was made of the set-up where Sandra Bullock's lead character starts off as a reclusive visual artist (the vital importance of being able to see etc.). But first the standard survival horror boxes are ticked off - including the gleeful raid on a supermarket while the nasties lurk outside - and then, completely unforgivably, the logic of the menace is done away with, since it was invisible supernatural beings after all. Bullock then runs around shouting a lot at her two kids (who she calls just 'boy' and 'girl' in some ridiculous reversion to pseudoprimitivism), there is a completely unexplained leap from them being trapped in the city to safety in a sylvan setting and finally a denouement that makes just as little sense. Shyamalan's much-panned jumble The Happening, which this decides to copy, having no other ideas of its own, was actually a far more coherent and unsettling work than this sorry affair.

3/10