Great - but bring your A-grade suspension of disbelief

Rating: 7/10 (27 December 2018)

Bird Box is based on the 2014 debut novel of Josh Malerman, and it's translation to film struggles with some of the leaps of faith that can maybe be more easily made in print.
Malorie (Sandra Bullock) is a crotchety, middle-aged, mother-to-be when the planet goes beserk with an unidentified force giving folks some weird pink-eye, closely followed by an irresistible compulsion to kill themselves.
By un/happy accident (depending on the character's POVs), Malory is dragged into a (gorgeous) home where a collection of tropes have somehow gathered to seek shelter.
Top shelf casting here as Trevante Rhodes (Tom), John Malcovich, Jacki Weaver, Machine Gun Kelly, Tom Hollander and the psychiatrist dude from SVU join a couple of other randoms, largely as road kill on the path to learning a bit more about how the invisible agents of infection operate. They scare birds. They can infect some people who become weaponised and infiltrate 'clean' groups - sort of insultingly, these carriers appear to be escaped mental patients.
Eventually, the group is picked off save for Malory, Tom and two newborn infants. Five years later, they're well-adjusted to their largely blindfolded life when they receive
radio contact from a person claiming to offer sanctuary, but only after a perilous journey. Drama follows.
Bullock is pretty good given the amount of facets she's asked to take on, although the amount of post-apocalyptic eyeliner she comes up with surprised me. The supporting cast, the two little kiddies in particular, are solid.
But, for me, the plot makes everyone work really hard. Successful thriller/horror films have to keep the tension between what we know, and what we don't know really balanced. Here, in trying to squish in a lot of the book's tangents, we're left with a lot of questions and not a huge amount of character development.
The ending is a surprise twist away from the novel's, which I think is a shame. For me, it's a
choice that ends up landing the film in 'young adult' territory.
It doesn't require Sherlockian powers of observation to see parallels between A Quiet Place and M Night Shyalaman's The Happening. Elements of sensory depravation, and the invasion of an unseen, psychopathic foe are present in all three films, which doesn't necessarily make any unoriginal.
For my money, director Susan Bier could have lost some characters, put Malorie on the road earlier, created some more spikes of tension and built to a darker, but still fully resolved and not necessarily tragic, conclusion.
The more pedestrian approach chosen seems, somehow, to me to need more suspension of disbelief than a more extreme one would have.
In any case, a pretty good effort and well worth the watch.