Sequels have a history of not living up to the originals. There have been exceptions of course—Terminator 2, The Godfather 2, Batman Returns, to name a few. Netflix’s latest drop, Bird Box Barcelona, the successor to the superhit horror film, Bird Box, starring Sandra Bullock, belongs to the former.
Featuring a motley group of characters in a fresh setting (from California to Barcelona), it has the same premise of the 2018 film (the fourth most-watched production on Netflix). While the first revolved around demonic entities causing unwitting individuals to commit suicide, the new one has at its centre the Seers, a group of individuals who are immune to the malevolent gaze of the ‘entities’.
Some of them, owing to a combination of post-traumatic stress and groupthink, form a biblical cult that goes on to kill non-seers by exposing them to the entities. The entire mission is unravelled through the journey of Sebastian (Mario Casas), whose trauma and eventual redemption, define the arc of Bird Box Barcelona.
We first see the protagonist in an endearing sequence, where he is skating with his young daughter Anna in an abandoned, dimly lit court. There is no reason to doubt his intentions, that is, until he is seen leading a busload of people to their deaths. We discover that Sebastian is a seer, and Anna, the ghost of his dead daughter. Bird Box Barcelona oscillates between the themes of bereavement and saviour complex against a post-apocalyptic backdrop.
The protagonist’s cult-ish motivations behind facilitating these deaths fall apart when he meets Sofia, a girl as old as Anna, in the following group of survivors. It is here that the film explores what people may choose to make of themselves in the wake of an apocalyptic event. There is a psychiatrist wryly realising the irony of counselling people against modern-day madness, a couple of divorcees who are forced to see beyond the infidelity that drove them apart, and a Spanish man contending with the relevance of his racism while interacting with a Mexican emigre. They are also seen fighting their regrets, which get weaponised by the entities as mind voices.
While the story is compelling in parts, there is plenty of unrealised potential. The plot points are not explored well enough to generate the much-needed element of thrill, and familiar concepts from the original are at times over-explained. What could have been a hauntingly evocative tale, gets reduced to an ordinary survival drama, blocking the film’s entry into the sequel hall of fame.
