The Coming of the Birds

Rating: 10/10 (17 February 2010)

Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is one of the most elegant exercises in the creation of suspense, tension and terror. The story is deceptively simple: a wealthy young lady pursues a love interest to a remote little town. And when she arrives strange, unexplainable bird attacks start happening.
Using a story by Daphne Du Maurier, Hitchcock creates terror from the most unlikely source: common birds, these peaceful creatures that flee from us and avoid us; in this movie they become, by their sheer number, a dangerous force of evil that attacks people randomly and without purpose.
The movie's story is very similar to the work of a forgotten but amazing fantasy writer, Arthur Machen, who wrote a novel during WWI about the animal kingdom declaring war on Mankind. What distinguishes both works is that Hitchcock never suggests a reason for this change in the natural order.
The movie is constructed with the typical Hitchcockian fare: immediately likable characters, comic relief, and an understanding that what he's doing is complete fiction and not a realistic representation of anything. Hitchcock made movies to entertain, and this movie is very entertaining.
Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren are very good in their respective roles, but I'd argue that this movie is not about human relationships but how people function in situations of tension and terror, and with the unexpected and the implausible.
The cinematography here sometimes reaches unimaginable heights of creepiness: one need only look at the shots of the birds peacefully standing on phone wires or roofs, looking at the viewer demurely, without giving any indication if they're going to attack or not. So much of the dread of this movie comes from the anticipation, from waiting something bad to happen because we're constantly waiting for it. There was no one like Hitchcock to manipulate the viewer's emotions.
47 years later, The Birds remains a very good thriller, with excellent special effects, and with a never-ending sense of dread and doom that will leave the viewer thinking for days how such a small change in the order of things could disrupt human life so entirely.