Directors: David Pastor and Alex Pastor
Writers: Josh Malerman, David Pastor, and Alex Pastor
Stars: Georgina Campbell, Mario Casas, Diego Calva
Synopsis: After an entity of mysterious origin annihilates the world’s population causing those who observe it to take their lives, Sebastián and his daughter begin their own great adventure of survival in Barcelona.
At first, Bird Box: Barcelona had an arresting setup for a horror thriller. That’s because it has a clever protagonist and a first act that is genuinely engaging and even suspenseful. The story follows Sebastian (Mario Casas) and his adolescent daughter, Anna (Alejandra Howard), as they navigate the dystopian city of Barcelona, now with nothing but desolate streets and more abandoned cars than people. The world is experiencing an apocalyptic event in which mass groups have committed suicide all across Europe and Asia. The survivors must be blindfolded when outside, or an entity will take over their bodies if they open their eyes around the mysterious force, and you know the rest.
I won’t mention much of the plot here because this is one of the few cases where the trailer does an admirable job of bearding the story, which is crucial to the Bird Box: Barcelona. I will say the writing and directing team of Alex and David Pastor do a wonderful job of surprising the viewer and ratcheting up an enormous amount of tension within the first twenty minutes. This is refreshing because once you’ve seen a couple of apocalyptic openers, you’ve seen them all, but the Pastor brothers manage to clear that hurdle here.
That being said, it’s pretty obvious what is going on with Sebastian and Anna, and they rip that band-aid off quickly, which I found refreshing. Yet, after this point, the film goes downhill and becomes stagnant. For one, they needed more time to flesh out the backstory between the father and daughter. Even though there are some breathtakingly ominous visuals, the subway scene, if more time were dedicated to this narrative, would have established a more significant emotional resonance between the two characters and given the third act’s scenes greater heft. Even the backstory concerns a mysterious group of what they call “seers” and their beliefs about the entity’s purpose. In this case, the seers believe this mysterious force is an angel, and when they enter and then leave the body, the entity is taking their souls to heaven.
The Pastor’s script smartly flips the scenarios from the original Bird Box. Now, instead of seeing the event through the eyes of someone trying to survive, it’s through a villain’s lens. However, after that point, not enough time is invested in the characters to care about their outcomes, and the suspense level drops off significantly. The Bird Box: Barcelona’s script would have worked better if we had a group of people trying to escape to a haven but not knowing if one was the villain, slowly picking off each group member individually. Here, we know who the villain is in the first act. If we shifted the first act villain to the main antagonist throughout the film, Padre Esteban, then at the very least, allowed the second act to play out to figure out who the secret seer is, and the suspense would have remained constant throughout the picture.
Bird Box: Barcelona has plenty of potential, and most may enjoy the film for the tense horror thrills it will provide novice film fans. The main issues remain in the muddled themes that start to bleed over one another without offering enough clarity. For instance, the big scene the Pastor’s work towards really is about anti-clericalism, but is traded in for cheap gore that offers little to elevate the film or even add to the excitement. What happened here is the Pastors are probably held to a by-the-numbers script because Netflix has seen fit to create their own Bird Box Cinematic Universe, the BBCU if you will. If only the filmmakers had taken greater chances at the movie’s beginning instead of recycling the same genre tropes until the end. While Bird Box: Barcelona offers some mild insight into why some can function without masking their eyes, this film is a classic horror genre in the final fifty minutes. This is a mild non-recommendation, but the film promises an intriguing apocalyptic franchise for the future if they finally begin to analyze the purpose of the entity and its actions.
