Susanne Bier’s Bird Box became a cultural phenomenon at the end of 2018.
The Netflix original film had one of the most popular debuts in the
streaming service’s history, with over 46 million accounts watching in the
first week of its release.
Bird Box is split up into two parts. The first shows the beginning of the apocalypse. The second takes place five years later, when Malorie takes a two-day journey down the river in search of refuge. The time frames switch constantly throughout the film’s bloated two-hour run time, but the focus is put on the former.
Bird Box tries to comment on the intricacies of trauma and survival but instead uses dangerous misconceptions of mental illness and gratuitous displays of suicide for shock value. It doesn’t even bother to distinguish between different mental illnesses. Mental illness and suicide operate as cheap, lazy villains that are easy to hate because they make healthy people ill for amusement of the sick. The audience is not told to care whether or how the characters survive but what to be afraid of-and they are told repeatedly that the real monster is people with mental illness. v
Streaming on Netflix
