I enjoyed 2018's Bird Box, even if I found it a little bit inadvertently derivative of A Quiet Place. It was only the other week that I discovered a sequel was in the works, an unrelated story set in Barcelona, Bird Box: Barcelona, so it was a pleasure to discover this had been released last week. Me and my best friend were both fans of the first film so we settled down to watch it, however it was only myself who managed to complete it, details of which are to follow later in this review.
Sebastián (Mario Casas) and his daughter Anna (Alejandra Howard) are introduced as survivors of the apparent invasion of creatures who have the ability to turn anyone who sees them suicidally insane. While out on the streets of Barcelona they come across another group of survivors, and so Sebastián tells his daughter to hide while he tries to find out if they are hostile or not. He befriends the group and is led to their hideout, an old bus station warehouse. That evening however, while everyone else is sleeping, Sebastián reveals his true colours, forcing all the survivors outside where they are quickly exposed to the invaders, for he is one of the special people who have gone insane, rather than suicidally insane. In his mind the invaders are angels, he believes he is doing God's work and that each person who dies has their soul free to ascend to Heaven, his daughter is actually a hallucination who promises he will be reunited with his dead wife and Anna if he carries on doing God's work. After befriending a different group of survivors he learns that there is a safe haven in a mountain top castle on the other side of the city, so he convinces them to make an attempt to head there. Initially he plans to kill them all, but his experiences during his journey slowly begin to make him question if everything he believed to be true is actually so.
So, the part that made my friend stop watching this was the reveal that the protagonist is actually the antagonist. It was a brave decision to have that prologue twist as it made it a lot harder to root for Sebastián at all. My friend didn't like how horrible everything was, as the man does kill a lot of innocent and good people. Like Bird Box, the story is split between the present day and the past, but the split is a lot less even, with roughly ten percent of the movie being made up of flashbacks that reveal how Sebastián came to be infected. While he is a somewhat sympathetic character, there was no getting away from the fact that he was causing people to die, and good people at that, and so it was hard to care for him. Around the end of the first act there are two more protagonists introduced, and thankfully these two were a lot better. Claire (Georgina Campbell - Black Mirror - episode 'Hang the DJ') is an English speaking woman, and she is looking after a young German girl, Sofia (Naila Schuberth), who got seperated from her mother during the height of the invasion some nine months previously. They become the heart of the story, with their journey mirroring that of Malorie and her children in Bird Box. While the majority of the movie is in Spanish, I did find it slightly distracting that Claire was the only English speaker, it makes sense I guess, but was a bit jarring her speaking English when all around were understanding what she was saying and responding in Spanish which she too is shown to understand.
Up until near the end I had a slightly higher score in my head for Bird Box: Barcelona, but it was the similarities that brought this down a bit. Characters trying to make it to an apparent safe haven was an identical storyline to the first movie, and as this went on the comparisons felt more and more obvious. Outside of the initial twist that Sebastián wasn't a good person there wasn't really anything more, his path to redemption was of course going to happen, with events not really going anywhere different to what I expected. Much like the first film, you never see the invaders, something which is a very good idea, it creates in your mind something far more better than anything that could be shown on screen. There is a greater explanation for what happens to the people who see them, but thankfully there still isn't a concrete explanation. It seems each victim sees what they want to see, the twisted protagonist seeing them as angels, others seeing them as aliens and all manner of other things. Some fun news ideas were here, such as one group using blindfolded dogs to lead them through the streets. The death sequences are all lovely to see, each victim killing themselves in different ways, and the scenes of mass death, such as people in a subway station all throwing themselves onto the train tracks as a train is approaching were always fun and grim to see.
Get over the initial hurdle of having a bad guy as the lead character and there is a lot to enjoy here. It can be very dark at times, but it ends with a feeling of hope for those trying to survive. Very well made, this was a film I'm glad I decided to take off my blindfold and look at. Bird Box: Barcelona is currently streaming on Netflix.
SCORE:
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