Photo credit to Saeed Adyani

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Over winter break, while students were busy doing anything other than school work, the movie Birdbox exploded on Twitter.  Whether it was through memes, or people just texting about, it was difficult to look anywhere without hearing about it.  

Released on December 13, Birdbox became an instant hit with many Walter Johnson students, especially as students started break shortly after..  

“I mainly watched it because I saw it all over all of my social medias and honestly I just wanted to understand what everyone was talking about. It looked pretty cool and so many people had watched it so I just thought I might as well,” junior Gillian Birdsong said.  

In the movie, a woman named Malorie, played by Sandra Bullock, is desperately trying to bring herself and two kids to a safe location, made more difficult by being blindfolded throughout the movie. The reason for the blindfolds lie in the horror-thriller aspect of the movie: the creatures. The whole movie revolves around unseen creatures that are terrorizing humanity, causing them to commit suicide with one glance at them. As a result of this, the remaining humans alive must resort to traveling around with blindfolds on until they reach a safe indoor area.  

While this movie is original in some aspects, it resembles movies like A Quiet Place and Hush, both where one of the five senses isrendered useless against some sort of creature or killer.  

“It didn’t seem that new of an idea to me, because I’ve seen A Quiet Place before, but I think that it was cool that she was traveling with kids, and that the story kind of jumped back and forth from past to present,” junior Malina Grande said.  

Unlike a lot of movies with straightforward plot, Birdbox chose to go the route of starting off the movie with an action-packed scene in the present, with some aspects that leave the watcher confused as to where the characters are and how Malorie has two kids named “Boy” and “Girl.” It then flashes back to the past, before the world “ended” and gives the viewer slightly more insight to Malorie’s situation. This pattern repeats continuously throughout the movie, giving the viewer more and more information – revealing the complex plot in an original way, contrary to most horror movies.  

The movie also does a great job of focusing on the development of complex characters and their relationships to one another in a post-apocalyptic world, where most movies of this genre fall short. Birdbox creates a complex, unusual relationship between Malorie and her children.  The complicated relationship she has with the kids is revealed through many aspects like their names, the way she interacts with them and the big decision towards the end of the movie, in which she chooses which kid to sacrifice in order to make the journey to the safe haven.  

“It didn’t make sense to me at first why the kids didn’t have names, but as the movie progressed it explained why, which I thought was cool.  Also, I didn’t know how she had two kids with her when at the beginning she is only pregnant with one, so that was confusing but I liked how they explained it later on,” senior Sophie Lembo said.  

While the movie itself may not be groundbreaking in either its horror aspect or its concept, Birdbox is certainly a must-see movie.