Bird Box is a very good film.
Director Susanne Bier manages to capture something true and meaningful with the aid of Sandra Bullock and Sarah Paulson. Even though the two shared less than five minutes of screen time, their rapport and chemistry as two sisters witnessing the beginning of the end of the world grounded the movie in its own urgent reality. Then the reality metamorphosed without our noticing into its own devilish little universe that Bier reveals in breaths of wind, literal hair-raising, and the fear of not what we cannot see but what we can but should not gaze at.
Just as importantly, Sandra Bullock, who portrays Malorie, is a woman who is not at home anywhere, but wants to be. Wishes she were. Even in her early roles, Sandra Bullock imbued her characters with a core of strength, of steel just below the surface, and Bier truly leverages this immanent indomitability that Bullock possesses. This is not a movie about a woman finding her power in a treacherous world. No, it’s a strength that’s already present, that needed no development, just like a cloak being thrown back to reveal the battered but still glittering armor beneath.
Importantly, this movie has respect for its characters. As humans do, sometimes they make stupid decisions. But they are human stupid decisions that make complete sense in the context of the movie and our own real world.
This is also a movie about the difficulty and danger of connecting with others. Malorie’s armor protects her but also, as armor does, keeps others at bay. It’s when the armor is removed that she’s at her most vulnerable but also the happiest. The most herself. It’s her realization of this that also parallels the river journey of the story. Bird Box, then, is a film about her understanding that not every approach is an attack — sometimes it’s a helping hand, an embrace, a gesture of good faith and common humanity. Difficulties connecting, despite all our ways to seemingly connect, is a theme of many movies of this era, and for good reason.
Bier understands that people can be hard but not assholes, that they can be tough but empathetic, that they can be nearly incomprehensibly stubborn and grumpy but still worth knowing and worth understanding. I have great sympathy for Bullock’s Malorie because I am myself stubborn and grouchy and difficult but there is nothing I wouldn’t do for my partner and my friends if they needed it.
I suspect it took a woman director to allow a character like Malorie to exist — few men would’ve demanded no cutesiness out of Bullock, while still permitting wonderful small moments of vulnerability, of care, and even delight, all without removing her agency and her reasons to be who she is. Malorie is now one of my favorite movie characters because rarely has such a very nuanced and deep personality as she is been allowed to exist in a woman character — and all in one who is both truly likable but also difficult, a bit annoying, grumpy and yet whose decisions and raison d’être make complete sense.
Bier is a talented director who understands how to tell a story with economy and grace. Her shots cohere in a way that most don’t today in modern directorial trends. She eases and sometimes hurries the story along without condescending to or deceiving the viewer, and without wasting any time at all. She to her great credit makes every second of film count. Each shot is a story, and each shot furthers the story itself. It’s great storytelling in a way that has to be seen to be understood.
Now let’s talk about Sarah Paulson. She only has a little screen time but she grabs every second of that to show us the horror of the world that’s coming. Her dissolution in the face of the unseen threat is some great acting — and even more so because it’s so minimalist. And, trust me, it’s all the more persuasive for that. There’s no screaming. Only a little crying. Her body language and her despairing intensity convey so much that all the words in the world could not. I did not know an actor could credibly portray the complete extinguishing of a self, but Paulson does it and it’s horrifying. It’s a scene that firmly jerks the movie from a possible middle-age bildungsromanesque hero’s journey into a rout and a retreat — a defeat before the war’s even declared.
I highly recommend Bird Box. It held me rapt, as a good story should, and that is more than nearly all movies manage these days.