Bird Box (2018)

Released in 2018 on Netflix, Bird Box is an American horror-thriller film about a post-apocalyptic survival of a mother and two children. The movie is based on Josh Malerman’s 2014 Novel of the same name having Susanne Bier as the director and Eric Heisserer as the screenplay writer. The movie follows a story of a woman played by Sandra Bullock over the stretch of 5 years, who is doing everything she could to save herself and two children from an unseen enemy. The world is attacked by unseen creatures with supernatural powers which makes humans go insane and kill themselves once they look at these creatures.   

The movie was first officially released on Netflix on December 21, 2018, as it started streaming worldwide through Netflix, the biggest OTT platform in the world.

Important Numbers:

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Awards: 5 wins & 10 nominations

Plot:

The movie starts in a post-apocalyptic world with Malorie Hayes instructing two 5-year-old children about their journey along the river downstream with a rowboat. Her instructions make sure to convince children not to remove their blindfolds and they will die if they do so. As the movie progresses with their rowboat journey, it alternates between two-time lines and tell us how it all started and how Malorie’s story halted on the current stage.

The movie runs back and forth between times lines, wherein, their river journey is full of thrilling experiences and scary incidents as non-human beings try to convince all of them to open their blindfolds. Five years earlier story starts with the world going crazy with incidents of people attempting mass suicide, starting from Romania and later spreading across the globe. 

Malorie is pregnant and her sister Jessica visits her to take her to the hospital and sudden new report on television of unexplained mass suicides in Romania that are quickly spreading across Europe. After a routine checkup, on the way back, the world around them starts going haywire as people start getting bewitched as they look upon unnatural entities. Jessica sees the entity, crashes the car, and ends up committing suicide by walking into the path of an oncoming truck, killing herself, all of this while Malorie watches it. 

As the world goes into chaos, Malorie along with a few survivors ends up in a house for safety, where we see the rest of the cast. As everybody at the house tries to recover from unwanted scenarios, theories emerge about what’s going around them. Tom insists to the group that they should cover all the windows and blindfold themselves whenever they must venture outside. 

As soon as everybody settles, Greg volunteers to tie himself to a chair while monitoring the surveillance cameras to see the entity on TV as it approaches but ends up killing himself by rocking his chair violently and slamming his head into a hearthstone after seeing it.

Performance:

Bird Box was watched by nearly 26 million viewers in its first seven days of release in the United States. It also revealed that a significant part of its audience was young – aged 18 to 34 (36%) – female (57%), and either African American (24%) or Latino (22%). Netflix also released its own viewing figure that gave a worldwide audience of more than 45 million in seven days, with views defined by the company as the film streaming for over 70 percent of its time. Bird Box became the most-watched film on Netflix within 28 days of its release, with 282.02 million hours being viewed. It retained this position until being displaced by Red Notice in 2021.

Forbes described the movie as one “that embraces everything about the (horror genre) formula, both good and bad—this movie has moments of true, delightful, fright, but it also has some of the corniness and shallowness that many horror movies can’t shake.

Controversies:

Bird Box blindfold challenge

In Australia, Netflix originally partnered with four Twitch streamers in performing what they called a Bird Box challenge, in which they would play some popular video games while blindfolded. However, the challenge became widely mimicked on the Internet by individuals wearing blindfolds while trying to do ordinary activities, causing injuries to some. In response, Netflix released several messages over social media advising people not to undertake the challenge or hurt themselves. Nevertheless, in January 2019, a 17-year-old girl in a blindfold taking part in the craze drove into oncoming traffic in Utah and crashed her car, prompting state police to issue the same warning as Netflix.

Cast:

• Sandra Bullock as Malorie Hayes
• Trevante Rhodes as Tom
• Jacki Weaver as Cheryl
• John Malkovich as Douglas
• Sarah Paulson as Jessica Hayes
• Rosa Salazar as Lucy
• Danielle Macdonald as Olympia
• Lil Rel Howery as Charlie
• Tom Hollander as Gary
• Machine Gun Kelly as Felix (credited as Colson Baker)
• BD Wong as Greg
• Pruitt Taylor Vince as Rick
• Vivien Lyra Blair as Girl / Olympia
• Julian Edwards as Boy / Tom
• Parminder Nagra as Dr. Lapham
• Rebecca Pidgeon as Lydia
• Amy Gumenick as Samantha
• Taylor Handley as Jason
• Happy Anderson as River Man
• David Dastmalchian as Whistling Marauder 

Movie Dialogues:

“In the end, there are only two types of people. The assholes and the dead” – Douglas

[Convert it to Tshirt]

Parent’s Guide to watching:

Rated R for violence, bloody images, language, and brief sexuality.

Nudity – Two people have sex. Three kiss scenes, no nudity unlike the first scene where a nude woman, breasts exposed, and a man can be seen clearly nude from left-hand side inside a dark room for a couple of seconds.

Violence – Some of the deaths have a bloody outcome. Some of the most gruesome violent scenes are abruptly cut away and in turn, occur offscreen. There is a lot of background violence as people start committing mass suicide. A woman bashes her head into a window repeatedly, her forehead is extremely bloody with a large gash.

Photos & Videos:

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Trivia:

1. Cast members said John Malkovich had a bizarre connection with the birds on the set. If he told the birds to move their feet, they would.

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