To describe the new Netflix thriller, directed by Susanne Bier, Bird Box, as “A Quiet Place, but for sight” isn’t inaccurate. John Krasinski’s film about an American family is located in a world where silence means life; mysterious blind creatures kill anyone that makes a sound. Bier’s film about an American family is located in a world where blindness means life; a mysterious outdoor force causes anyone who sees it to commit suicide. Pregnancy and children drive the physical suspense of both plots. A mother, fresh from the agony of having to literally ‘survive’ the ordeal of childbirth, is a natural survivalist in both stories. Male partners are martyred in identical circumstances.
Strike one for terror
Being wordless in today’s America, however, is clearly a more compelling challenge than being sightless. This is evident in the way A Quiet Place internalises the allegory of cinema, a visual medium, more organically than Bird Box, a film that can’t afford to make the viewer internalise its terror – how, you wonder, is a viewer supposed to feel the essence of blindness by watching the film?
Unlike A Quiet Place , which uses survivors and their customised spaces to suggest evidence of the past, Bird Box , a movie that discourages the very concept of imagery, counts on literal visualisation; it shows us the backstory of the outbreak by intercutting it with the present-day struggle of the blindfolded lady navigating a choppy river.
In doing so, it crowds the narrative with sub-genres. One timeline contains a generic cabin fever thriller; a bunch of conveniently diverse American strangers are stuck in a condo while discovering the technicalities of the apocalypse. The other timeline, which deserved more screen time (like, say, I Am Legend), contains the sparse intimacy of a last-ditch survival thriller – the kind of adventure you’d imagine Emily Blunt and her kids to undertake in the A Quiet Place sequel. Bird Box is, on all accounts then, a generic Hollywood doomsday movie.
But there’s also a level of sociopolitical subtext beneath its gimmickry that reflects the fundamental ideological core of underdog storytelling. This can be defined by the tagline of M. Night Shyamalan’s Split : ‘The broken are the more evolved’. Midway through Bird Box , it is revealed that a particular breed of humans are unaffected by the vicious psychological symptoms of the epidemic: the clinically insane. They are the only ones who can afford to keep their eyes open without wanting to kill themselves – a lyrical subversion of the status quo. In fact the outcasts feel a melancholic bond with the invisible force, almost as if they were relieved that “normal” humans would finally understand the curse of living with voices and pain and shadows in their heads. They go around prying unsuspecting victims’ eyes open, willing them to embrace this ‘condition’. It is soon revealed that the visually challenged, too, are immune to the force.
Broken yet more evolved
The Beast in Split – the psychological zenith of dissociative-identity-disorder-afflicted protagonist Kevin Crumb (crumb, meaning piece, implying broken) – spares his teenaged captive when he discovers scars of self-harm on her wrist. He calls her “pure,” declaring that the impure – the sheltered softies with no perspective of trauma – are the ones who deserve to perish. This is reflected in the death of the second pregnant lady in Bird Box , a naive girl who admits to Bullock that she trusts the goodness of people because she was always protected by her parents.
Shyamalan’s entire filmography is based on inverting the perception of ‘weakness’ – a boy’s asthma protects him from poisonous gases in Signs , a blind girl manages to defy a mythical creature in The Village , a man with a rare bone disease is an evil genius in Unbreakable , a child with hallucinatory problems sees dead people in The Sixth Sense . Ditto for the sound-hating zombies who spare the emancipated in Marc Foster’s World War Z ; human resistance is triggered by an antidote that involves infecting survivors with deadly pathogens to camouflage them from the attack. Or the resistance in A Quiet Plac e, built upon frequencies emitted by a cochlear implant worn by the family’s only hearing-impaired member.
Beautifully flawed
The point being: even the audacious American genre movie, much like its romantic coming-of-age counterpart, is not immune to the intellectualisation of pain. The celebration of flaws assumes a more literal identity – despots, disabled veterans, diseased outlaws – in post-apocalyptic horror flicks; they are merely another version of the heartbroken lover who uses grief as a springboard to greatness. Or the tortured artist who channelises desolation into creation. Their status reflects the retaliatory expression of a culture trying to compensate for the intolerant air that its leaders breathe. The marginalised are higher beings. The haunted are destiny’s children. There is, eventually, nothing more human than a real tragedy. And there is nothing more tragic than a real human.
