Bird Box review: Netflix drama doesn't take you anywhere you've not already been

Dir: Susanne Bier. Starring: Sandra Bullock, Sarah Paulson, Rosa Salazar, Tom Hollander, Machine Gun Kelly, John Malkovich. Cert 15, 124 mins

“Never, ever, take off your blindfold! If you look, you will die!” Malorie (Sandra Bullock) tells two terrified young children at the start of Susanne Bier’s wayward Netflix sci-fi thriller. They’re about to head down river to possible safety but, for reasons which are eventually explained, they can’t look where they are going.

Bier’s credits range from TV’s The Night Manager to and the Oscar-winning In a Better World. She and her high-profile cast are surely above routine genre fare like this. The film’s best moments are the early ones when catastrophe first looms. Malorie is heavily pregnant, an artist who has turned her apartment into a studio. Her sister Jessica (Sarah Paulson) is planning to buy a horse. Bier emphasises the everyday normalcy of their lives so that what follows is all the more startling. TV news is carrying stories of airports and train stations closing down and of a wave of unexplained mass suicides in Romania and Siberia.

Everyone in the US suddenly goes crazy too. Patients in the hospital bang their heads against the windows. Passers-by step in front of traffic. Cars deliberately crash. People blow their brains out or exhibit what the newscasters worriedly call “psychotic behaviour”.

The filmmakers relish showing the collapse of civilisation. Bird Box, though, has an awkward structure. It jumps between the present (Malorie and the two kids heading downriver in their blindfolds) and the cataclysmic events in the past that left them in such a predicament.

In John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place, one of the best genre films of the year, the creatures laying waste to humanity can’t see but rely on their hyper-sensitive sense of sound. Here, humans can’t risk using their eyesight when they are outdoors. If they do so, they will come face to face with what they most fear.

When it comes to playing characters desperate to survive, Bullock has few equals. Just as in Alfonso Cuaron​’s Gravity, she shows extreme resilience in circumstances which would drive others towards despair. Malorie doesn’t just keep herself alive but does everything she can to protect the two nameless children accompanying her. There is nothing wrong with Bullock’s performance but the storytelling here becomes increasingly incoherent. Arguably, it wasn’t such a smart idea to have Bullock play an action hero who is nine months pregnant.

Nor is the middle section, in which the film turns into a claustrophobic chamber piece, at all convincing. Malorie ends up stranded in a house with several strangers, among them an irascible misanthrope called Douglas (John Malkovich) and a handsome ex-soldier (Trevante Rhodes). Civilisation may be crumbling but the strangers are so busy bickering among themselves that they hardly seem to notice.

Malkovich gives one of his sneering, high camp performances as the much-married Douglas who has every excuse for loathing Malorie. “My first wife said to call me a creep would be an affront to creeps everywhere,” he acknowledges as his behaviour grows ever more selfish and erratic. His one moment of happiness, probably the single most joyful scene in the film, is when he discovers the shelves of booze in an abandoned supermarket. He is like a pig in clover as he swigs whisky and fills his trolley with bottles. If this is the end of the world, the alcohol takes the edge off the apocalypse. Tom Hollander is also good value as a charming newcomer to the household with a strange glint in his eyes.

There have been countless other dystopian sci-fi dramas in which civilisation collapses and survivors try to hold their families together. Bird Box doesn’t take us anywhere we haven’t already been in these other movies. The plotting is sometimes very cumbersome. As the protagonists stumble through forests using fishing line to guide them, you begin to wish they would take off their blindfolds and simply look where they are going. The screenplay never really explains why the evil force (whatever it might be) causes some of those who stare at it to kill themselves while turning others into homicidal psychotics.

You don’t need directors and stars of the calibre of Bier, Bullock and Malkovich for B-movie material like this. Bird Box is one Netflix-backed film that is best seen on a TV or computer screen. Few will be arguing for it to be given a run in cinemas.

Bird Box is available to stream on Netflix on 21 December