Bird Box Barcelona Review: Film That Blindfolded Needed to Keep The Franchise Alive
Cast: Mario Casas, Georgina Campbell, Diego Calva, Naila Schuberth
Director: Jérémie Rozan
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3.5/5 (three and a half stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
It is not a remake, as we had imagined before preparing to watch it, but a sort of spin-off: Bird Box Barcelona, directed by David and Àlex Pastor, moves in the same universe as Bird Box, a successful horror film from 2018 starring Sandra Bullock, but it doesn’t pick up or connect in any way to the story already told. The world in which we find ourselves is still plagued by strange entities that push anyone who sees them to suicide, but compared to the previous film, set in the USA, we find ourselves in Spain, and the two storylines – for now, but maybe in the future things could change – they have no way to intertwine. As we will see in this Bird Box Barcelona review, for this second chapter of the story a particularly intelligent choice was made: to keep what had determined the success of the first film, but at the same time to renew itself, telling a completely different story in its way, which starts from a new starting point. Who are the villains of the story? We are not talking about the creatures that drive the unfortunate to suicide, but about those people who, even after seeing them, have not taken their own lives.
People who have lost their minds and devoted themselves to entity worship are now trying to get other survivors to look directly at them as well. What happened to him? What drives them to the terrible actions they commit? The plot of Bird Box Barcelona is interesting and intriguing at the right point, although the ending is rather predictable. Following the arrival of a mysterious presence whose goal is to destroy the world’s population, Sebastián embarks on a survival journey through the deserted streets of Barcelona. Along the way, he will meet other survivors with whom he will form uncertain alliances to try to escape the city. However, they soon realize that there is a new and unexpected threat, even more dangerous. The plot of Bird Box Barcelona will not be particularly new, but it does work as a natural extension of the Blind franchise, which started in 2018 with a wonderful Sandra Bullock and now continued with Mario Casas who eats up the screen. The Spanish actor picks up the baton as the protagonist of this spin-off, and he does so by giving us an adventure with a lot of action, even more tension, and some sequences so spectacular that we will doubt the nationality of the film.
Bird Box Barcelona Review: The Story Plot
A father and his daughter try to survive in Barcelona plagued by terrible creatures: anyone who sees them feels the irrepressible impulse to take their own lives. However, the man hides a terrible secret, and anyone who meets him could be in danger… A man, Sebastian (Mario Casas), and his daughter Anna (Alejandra Howard) slowly wander through the deserted streets of Barcelona: their eyes are covered, and there is something very dangerous that they must not see. Only indoors can they find a glimmer of normality, but they cannot let their guard down: if they are not the mysterious creatures that have invaded the world, and which drive those who look at them to suicide, it is the surviving human beings who constitute a danger, made violent from fear and hunger.
However, Sebastian hides a terrible secret: after meeting a group of survivors and being taken to their shelter, he manages to take them all outdoors, forcing them to look at the entities. Everyone quickly – and violently – takes their own life, and we understand that little Anna, who follows her father everywhere, is nothing more than a manifestation created by the creatures: Sebastian is one of the few who has looked at the creatures and not committed suicide and now wanders around Barcelona looking for new victims on their behalf. But is he aware of what he is doing? The man is convinced that by pushing people to take their own lives, he will free their souls from earthly pain, thus giving them access to a new and heavenly existence. For him, as for other survivors who have seen the entities.
Through numerous flashbacks we discover what happened to Sebastian and his family, how they faced the first days, the first months, after the fall of humanity: thanks to this look at the past we are told everything that happened to the protagonist, the reason for his actions and the blind faith that drives him to do what he does. But when he meets a new group of survivors and makes a strong friendship with the young Claire (Georgina Campbell) and the little Sophia (Nalia Schuberth), a German girl who has lost her mother and with whom no one but her can communicate, things could take an unexpected turn…
Bird Box Barcelona Review and Analysis
I have mentioned the technical as a feat in Spain, but the Pastor brothers slip in some scenes: although Bird Box Barcelona is visually successful, some sequences are clumsy and the effects pale in comparison to American films. Nothing worrisome, if I’m being honest, but having seen The Last Days, also by these two Spanish filmmakers and also shot in a post-apocalyptic Barcelona, I’m surprised that in some sequences it looks so good, and in others, Barcelona looks like a conglomerate of screens greens and CGI of dubious quality. Bird Box Barcelona may still be as generic as Blindfolded, but the saga continues to move in the right direction, becoming one of Netflix’s biggest IPs. Let’s hope that the streaming platform bets on more local stories like this, in the same way that Citadel will expand into different territories and spin-offs on Prime Video.
Netflix manages to conquer everyone with a story that bases its very essence on the classic mythological-religious theme of the forbidden, of the desire that leads to death, of obedience to divine rules that make one savor happiness but at the same time prevent looking into her eyes and touch her with her hand. Watching Bird Box Barcelona brings to mind Orpheus who shouldn’t have turned to look at Eurydice or Psyche who should never have had to turn on that lamp to see what the face of the mysterious Love was. But, in the end, the meaning of life, perhaps, is all hidden in that look, in that moment of pure happiness that precedes the tragedy.
Playing with the charm of desire and divine punishment, the human attraction towards mystery, and its capacity for destruction, Bird Box Barcelona manages to leverage human weaknesses and take the viewer into a dimension between dream and reality from which struggles to detach, even after viewing. Tormented, fascinating, and engaging, Bird Box Barcelona is a great film, a successful sequel, and the perfect choice for those who love difficult decisions, existential doubts, and stories that dare to go a little further.
As we anticipated at the beginning, the choice to explore new dynamics in a different context, without repeating what had already been done in the first Bird Box, is undoubtedly a winner. The story immediately involves and intrigues us precisely because it has very little to do with what we have already seen previously: above all, the idea of focusing on the perspective of the “villain” particularly struck us, in fact in the first film it seemed a bit the storyline of the madmen who had seen the entities was wasted, and we had wanted more insight. However, we have noticed how this Bird Box Barcelona takes some information for granted, especially in the opening, as if the spectators who approach it should preferably have seen the first chapter: the vision is much smoother if you know what is happening and you start from what has already been said, it could instead be a bit tricky if you have no idea what the context is.
The cast choices have fully satisfied us the protagonist Sebastian and Claire are struck, a survivor of British origins with a difficult past. Mario Casas is convincing in playing a loving father who, destroyed by mourning, would do anything to find his family, to the point of being conditioned to commit deplorable and wrong actions. We also appreciated the international casting, from Georgina Campbell to little Nalia Schuberth and Diego Calva, who plays Octavio, a character of Mexican origins. In our opinion, such a multi-ethnic cast highlights the “European” dimension of this second chapter, telling even better the consequences of an “apocalypse” of this kind in a varied context such as the one in which we live.
Paradoxically, if one had simply remodeled the source material, moving the setting from the United States to Europe and worthily delving into a new group of characters, the result would have been less painful. The viewer of Bird Box Barcelona accuses the lack of literary support for the facts narrated together with the unfortunate choice to enrich a story on which the writer Malerman had put an end with unpublished details. The dispersive and not very solid screenplay, populated by inconsistent and almost “pulled out” characters, certainly doesn’t help. Sebastián’s inner conflict, which would represent the main engine of the events that follow one another on stage, is barely explored and therefore fails miserably in its function of giving dramatic and emotional depth to a film that is cold and anonymous. Bird Box Barcelona is, in a nutshell, an action film that sacrifices the psychological factor in the name of a series of redundant special effects and ends in themselves.
The programmatic (and sadly commercial) intent of the entire operation jeopardizes the final result: the will to explain at all costs the unsaid on which the original feature film was based, eliminating the disturbing element at the center of the story and giving the “the” for further sequels, makes Bird Box Barcelona nothing more than a serial product, destined to get lost in the myriad of catastrophic tales already available on the various streaming catalogs. Added to this is the fact that Bird Box: Barcelona, not being an autonomous project, is destined to disappoint both the numerous admirers of Bier’s film (who will inevitably compare the two works) and the few who have never heard of it, from since it is impossible to understand what is happening on stage without knowing its premises. Given the success with the public, and stay-about birds, someone must have mistakenly mistaken the Bird Box for hens that lay golden eggs.
Bird Box Barcelona Review: The Last Words
Bird Box Barcelona may still be as generic as Blindfolded, but the saga continues to move in the right direction, becoming one of Netflix’s biggest IPs. Let’s hope that the streaming platform bets on more local stories like this, in the same way that Citadel will expand into different territories and spin-offs on Prime Video. The film makes the excellent choice not to repeat what has already been seen in the previous film but to renew itself, changing context and perspective. Whether you liked the previous film or not, Bird Box Barcelona is worth watching fans of post-apocalyptic horror will find in David Pastor and Àlex Pastor’s film the dark and violent atmospheres that make this kind of story so intriguing, they will appreciate the different cues that give way to the narrative and the many surprises that dot the plot.
