Satisfying

Rating: 8/10 (3 January 2019)

Over the last year Netflix has released a number of films that are right up my alley, with weird supernatural events being the cornerstone of them all. Most of them, whilst being lavishly put together with an intriguing hook, good performances from great casts, and oftentimes wonderful imagery and ideas, suffered from having poor or even non-existent endings. Thankfully, in this reviewer's humble opinion, Bird Box did all that it needed to do.
I think this was a story about the characters, not the event. Yes, I can see why a lot of people were left wanting in regards to the "creatures" and their origins, but I feel those questions were answered by the drawings laid out by one of the characters at one point. Those images were very similar to the kind of imagery evoked by H. P. Lovecraft. That ties in very closely with the events happening in the film, so I drew my conclusions based on that. I guess if you're unfamiliar with Lovecraft you may miss that reference and be left wondering, so I suppose in that sense the film fails.
Even so, the performances were mostly great, the story was fairly solid, and whilst it did feel a little too long at some points, I felt it was still very satisfying to watch, especially since Lovecraft has seen surprisingly little love on the big screen. I'd recommend it, with the suggestion that you look at it as a character piece, with people trying to survive a disaster, rather than an in-depth look into the how's and why's of the disaster.