Terror, Beauty, Trauma in ‘Bird Box Barcelona’
When a sinister sublime weaponizes your emotional wounds
Spoilers ahead. With mentions of self-harm and suicide.
As Den of Geek’s Alec Bojalad correctly noted, the entities as drawn by Gary in the first Bird Box film were Lovecraftian: deeply, disturbingly dark, and one of them even has facial tentacles like Cthulhu. If Bird Box’s invisible assailants were indeed of the Lovecraftian category, mere contact with (via sight of) its incomprehensible evil was enough to break down the mind. As Lovecraft in “The Call of Cthulhu” wrote, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
In that case, the more unable the human mind to “correlate all its contents,” the more merciful the outcome — suicide for regular folks whose emotional issues have not yet crossed the line to complex, intense trauma. In the first Bird Box film, Gary mentioned the deliriously happy, un-blindfolded “psychos from Northwood,” a “mental institution for the criminally insane.” Compelled not to kill themselves but rather to make others see what they see, these “psychos” would break into homes to force those hiding within to go out and look at the creatures. In Bird Box Barcelona, the link between trauma (presumably the kind that could land one in…
