Film Review

Bird Box Barcelona (2023) — Spain-set sequel blindly walks same path

After the world is ravaged by mysterious entities, rival groups of survivors struggle in a decaying city.

Moral ambiguity is to be expected in any halfway serious drama, but there’s one genre where (with only a few exceptions) the Manichean division of the world, into good guys and bad guys, reigns as strong as it ever did in the Hollywood studio western: the post-apocalyptic.

Never mind that, in reality, our experiences of natural disasters suggests that people’s first inclination is to cooperate and not kill each other over the last can of cola; in shows like The Walking Dead (2010–2022), which carried it to tedious extremes, the real enemy is no longer the cause of the apocalypse but the greed or derangement of other victims.

Bird Box Barcelona, a sequel to Netflix’s 2018 hit, falls into this trap. To be fair, one of its main characters is morally ambiguous — and, in fact, their realisation of their own errors is central to the movie, albeit predictable. And it’s also true the first Bird Box…