By Cammie Dutchess
Contributing Writer
Let’s bring back the movie everyone wanted to forget: Netflix’s “Bird Box.”
This 2018 thriller, based on the novel by Josh Malermen, opens with Malorie, played by Sandra Bullock, intensely telling two young children to never take off their blindfolds. No matter what happens, the children are ordered to never remove the cloth that covers their eyes. If the blindfold is removed, one will see their worst fear, driving that person to commit suicide.
Throughout the movie, Malorie, who is also blindfolded, the boy and girl navigate their way down a river to find safe haven.
When the movie isn’t showing flashbacks of the trio maneuvering through the water, it shows five years prior when the mass suicides first started occurring in Sacramento, California and before the children were born. In these flashbacks, there was only a small group of survivors held in a house with taped-up windows and doors to shield whatever might be outside. The survivors go through their own struggles that determine whether they live or die.
Felix, played by rapper Machine Gun Kelly, and Lydia, played by Rosa Salazar, ended up taking a car and escaping. The movie never mentions anything about the duo for the rest of the movie, leaving questions about their whereabouts and whether they found refuge or not someplace else. Since the story leaves the audience wanting to know more about the development of their relationship, or lack thereof, people question whether or not there will be a follow-up movie based on the two.
The movie never shows the “thing” that causes these mass suicides, but it does show the effects of it being around, specifically in nature. When it is around, the wind picks up, birds fly away in a hurry to find peaceful shelter and leaves whirl around, creating a sort of chaos.
For Malorie to know when it is around when she’s blindfolded, she carries a box that has a few birds contained in it because they will chirp loudly and fly around the small container. Hence the name, Bird Box.
Fortunately, by the end of the film Malorie and the two children do find a home for the blind where they are welcomed along with other survivors.
It’s interesting that some people were not completely affected by the monster and didn’t cause harm to themselves, but rather thought that it was beautiful and tried to get other people to see the beauty of it. Some say that their lack of self-harm was due to the fact that they had mental issues. It’s a completely reasonable assumption that this movie brought light to the mental illness stigma.
However, this movie also seemed to villainize mental health issues. In many Hollywood movies, problems like mental illness are often weaponized and this movie is no different. The focus of the movie didn’t seem to be about the “monster” or the “thing” but about mental health. Nonetheless, a good movie provokes us to think.
jonesdca17@bonaventure.edu
