Birdbox Barcelona(Netflix)
Rating: * ½
Birdbox Barcelona is meant to be a sequel oto that tasteless 2018 Sandra Bullock helmed horror Birdbox where she and her screen-family had their eyes in cloth shields, as they made their way through some vague horror traffic.
Apparently if they opened their eyes they saw something and just killed themselves.
We feel pretty much the same watching this unwanted vapid sequel where ghouls have taken over the world and you either wear eye masks or you die.
Tough choice, especially if you have to run, drive,duck, jump off steep building into wobbly cable cars. Through most of this silly sequel ,Sebastian(played by Mario Casas who looks like Adam Driver’s pour cousin) herds a group of survivors through a gauntlet of ghouls.
Some of the purported terror works for the authentic atmosphere. Cinematographer Daniel Aranyo uses his lenses like creatures on the prowl. The frames are constantly shifting to create a chaos of visual now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t ambiguity .
But the fancy camerawork and eerie sound design cannot hide the emptiness of a world where posturing is prevalent, the actual fear of the unknown seldom gets to you.
Victims die.The plot moves on . Attack, run,attack.Repeat.
After a point, the whole exercise appears dimwitted, more so when the co-directors Alex & David Pastor aim to demonise the hero Sebastian dead daughter. Oh man, that’s too much of The Omen to digest in a film that belongs to the world of the damned and the doomed.
Not only is this a completely unnecessary sequel , there is little to engage us in the one-note survival story where Sebastian is assigned the task of saving a woman (Georgina Campbell) and a girl(Naila Schuberth) from the ghouls.
There are scream-out-loud moments where you realize the characters are doing the screaming while we the audience remain unscathed.
After a point it all seems like a pointless and perverse exercise. Agreed, these are tortured souls looking for redemption. But why must we be subjected to this torture?
