She once created paintings that evoked the loneliness of modern life-one where interconnected communications via social media, the internet, and even streaming services have left us evermore remote from one another’s emotional islands. Years prior to being a hardened Sarah Connor type, Malorie was an artist who defined everything that mattered to her by what she could see and how it made her feel. Repeatedly we switch from this ugly future to an even more chaotic past. It is a thematically rich paradox that has real-world applications that are quickly unspooled in the film’s crosscutting narrative. She will need to navigate white water rapids if she wishes to survive, and kids very well could mean her own death, even if their absence means the death of their collective future, no matter how long Malorie lasts on her own. The trip, which is set-up via scattered radio communication, is one she is warned will be impossible for children. She is not ready to say her own future is tied in with their survival. And while she’s been anchored to these children for years, she is still not ready to say anything more encouraging than, “If you take off your blindfold, I will hurt you” when preparing them for their journey. While they clearly do, like Holly Golightly and her eternally nameless “Cat” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Malorie knows a name requires a level of responsibility that anchors you to a specific place, and to a specific someone. When we first meet Sandra Bullock’s Malorie, she is the guardian of two children whom she names only “Girl” and “Boy.” To call them anything more would suggest a level of ownership, that they belonged to her. That prospect is both how Bird Box begins and ends: motherhood in precarious times seeming like an initial death sentence and then, finally, a saving grace. How do we make sense of such senseless annihilation, and thus find a palatable future in an ever dimming world? Night Shyamalan’s similar suicide-heavy The Happening is that the appeal is not in how Sandra Bullock’s loved ones are driven mad and forced to commit suicide-but rather how it affects those of us left behind. For what elevates Bird Box above, say, M. Indeed, the surprise feel-bad holiday smash has already been viewed by more than 50 million Netflix subscribers around the globe, and that number is likely to only increase as the weeks pass and the streaming service has to talk more people off the seeming ledge of the “ Bird Box Challenge.” But in the film, the challenge is more than the daft conceit of whitewater rafting with a blindfold on, albeit that is the film’s most thrilling sequence.

Tom in bird box