Despite 2018’s Bird Box (based on the Josh Malerman novel of the same name) becoming the most-watched movie in the history of Netflix at the time it premiered (according to Netflix, anyway), it took five years to even hear a peep of a potential franchise. Well, that egg has finally hatched and what has come out is the spinoff Bird Box Barcelona, which shares a premise, some producers, and exactly one stunt performer with the original Bird Box and nothing else.
The movie takes place in Spain (the home of the hit series Money Heist and Elite, so Netflix knows they can score some international crossover points; presumably, if Spain has said no, this movie would have been shot in South Korea and nowhere else). Just like the America of Bird Box, Spain has been ravaged by the arrival of unseen creatures who, when gazed upon, drive humans into a self-destructive fugue state. This time we’re following grief-stricken Barcelona local Sebastián (Mario Casas) as he meets up with a band of survivors including English psychiatrist Claire (Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell), immigrant physicist/pizza boy Octavio (Babylon’s Diego Calva), and a young German girl named Sofia (Naila Schuberth).
How Does Bird Box Barcelona Compare to the Original?
Right off the bat, we learn that Bird Box Barcelona has very different intentions than Bird Box. While the original movie was a Romero-esque “humans are the real monsters” post-apocalypse story with an “elevated” motherhood angle, Barcelona swaps out motherhood for grief and is mostly interested in being a Catholic crisis of faith picture. This is more fitting than it sounds, considering the way that the monsters occupy a liminal space that allows humans to apply their own understanding to them. So, if you’re a Spanish Catholic, then, well, there you go.
Unfortunately, the other main thing Bird Box Barcelona takes from the original is its out-of-order storytelling. This one relies on flashbacks rather than flashforwards, which get in the way of the tension of the main narrative less, but they get so far out of the way that they are finished delivering any sort of useful information about a third of the way through the movie.
Other than that, Barcelona is ever so slightly gorier (one death in particular is a doozy) and quite a bit less scary than Bird Box. In fact, genuine horror doesn’t even seem to be one of the major tones the movie is going for most of the time. There is also a very different tenor to the main character’s journey this time around that does add texture to the first two acts, even if at the end of the day it’s still pretty much taking the shape of the arc we already saw Sandra Bullock’s Malorie play out in Bird Box.
Should You Watch Bird Box Barcelona?
Because of its overall disinterest in horror, Bird Box Barcelona does veer dangerously close to not actually being interesting to watch whatsoever. It loses even more of its potency by conspicuously ditching most of the parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic that the original movie had in spades (entirely by accident, of course, but it worked because of its universal sense of apocalyptic dread). It only pays lip service to certain COVID-y aspects in very brief moments. It makes sense why Barcelona would want to avoid reminding viewers of the 2020 lockdowns, but in doing so it sands off almost every edge it could have had.
However, the movie does have its moments. A setpiece in a subway tunnel is superbly directed and one particular sequence in the third act climax will have you gnawing your fingernails down to the bone. The acting is all perfectly serviceable without any particular standouts. And there is at least a sense that somebodywanted the movie to be pleasant to look at, with recurring eyeball motifs, the introduction of cool-looking blacked-out goggles in addition to blindfolds, and a strong sense of when to highlight a space with strips of golden light or huge swaths of inky shadow.
Ultimately, Bird Box Barcelona is the platonic ideal of a Netflix movie. It’s never going to knock your socks off, but it delivers a story you can hang onto just enough that you won’t click back to your home page and waste 30 minutes trying to figure out what streaming service Jury Duty is on.
Score: 6/10