Written and directed by genre veterans David and Àlex Pastor, Bird Box: Barcelona moves at a brisker pace than its fairly languid 2018 predecessor, getting to the shock of its opening reveal about Sebastián’s nature and then galloping toward the next set piece of mass death as quickly as possible. Together, they inspire Sebastián to remember his own better angels and work to save a child at all costs in a search for salvation. In execution, however, it ultimately becomes much the same story, only with a bigger body count and variety of suicides as Sebastián falls into a survivor group with its own little girl (Naila Schuberth) and a maternal figure named Claire (Georgina Campbell). It’s the most interesting aspect of Bird Box: Barcelona that on the surface would seem to open the story up, as we are teased to consider this monstrous world from the point-of-view of one of the hunters who relentlessly pursued Bullock in the last film. Even his dead daughter, Anna, appears as a ghost (at least in his mind), urging him to save the souls of others by tricking them into laying eyes on these unseen creatures. As it turns out, he has seen “the creatures” before, and like the Tom Hollander character in the 2018 original, in his mind’s eye they appear to him as beautiful angels. Yet therein lies the most horrible secret about Sebastián, a man who deceives everyone: strangers, the audience, and even himself. In this nightmare, Sebastián only wants to protect his little girl Anna (Alejandra Howard). Sebastián (Mario Casas) is a desperate father stranded during an alien (or maybe spiritual?) reckoning that’s turned the world into a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which creatures that are never shown cause most folks who lay eyes on them to kill themselves in ceaselessly inventive ways. When the picture opens, we think we are witnessing a doppelgänger of Bullock’s beleaguered parent in the 2018 picture. The twist in question-which is impossible to not mention while analyzing the film-occurs inside of the first 15 minutes. This thing is certainly bigger and expands on the Bird Box lore, but its appeal largely relies on a twist that, at the end of the day, turns out to be less an ingenious turning of the tables and more an excuse to wallow in just how gruesome the death scenes can get. On paper I’d be skeptical about such an approach capturing lightning in the bottle a second time and now after seeing the finished Bird Box: Barcelona, rekindling that zeitgeist appeal seems downright staggering. Maybe that’s why the film’s ostensible sequel is trying to do the same thing again, only this time without Bullock.
A TIME TO KILL NETFLIX MOVIE
Since then we’ve seen a lot of Netflix thrillers led by movie stars taking a streaming paycheck, and few have had the impact of Bird Box. Yet I might argue that it’s unclear whether that film scored with audiences because of its grindhouse-adjacent premise or simply due to it being a high-concept movie starring Sandra Bullock that was released during the doldrums of a holiday season. Is Bird Box a movie franchise? More precisely, is Bird Box essentially a shared cinematic universe? Netflix obviously thinks so, as this weekend’s Bird Box: Barcelona acts as both a spinoff and a naked bit of franchise world-building after the original Bird Box movie took streaming subscribers by storm… for a couple of weeks in December 2018, at any rate. This review has a mild Bird Box: Barcelona spoiler.
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