‘Bird Box Barcelona’ Review: Blind Faith

In the mildly entertaining Sandra Bullock car, “Bird Box,” alien invaders had been presumed so fearsome to behold that every one who gazed upon them instantly offed themselves. Possibly to avoid wasting audiences from the same destiny, we had been by no means permitted to see these terrors, leaving us as sightless because the film’s scrabbling survivors.

Another day, one other postapocalyptic hellscape. Transplanting the fundamental premise to Spain, the administrators Àlex Pastor and David Pastor have give you a by-product characteristic, “Bird Box Barcelona,” minus Bullock however with the addition of a reasonably nifty — and depressingly credible — faith-based twist. Nine months after the aliens’ arrival, an engineer named Sebastián (Mario Casas) and his younger daughter (Alejandra Howard) are looking for survivors in a metropolis the place the remaining people are as feared because the invaders. Yet as Sebastián beneficial properties the belief of successive ragtag teams, he quickly reveals a objective that’s much more terrifying than theft.

Shooting in and round Barcelona, the cinematographer Daniel Aranyó conjures an atmospheric dystopia of blasted buildings and ruined roadways. The useless and dying are in all places, difficult the film’s special-effects group to create ever-more-horrible avenues of self-harm. As Sebastián and an English psychologist (Georgina Campbell) search refuge on a mountaintop fortress accessible solely by cable automobile, flashbacks illuminate the genesis of his twisted mission and the subtly shifting powers of the intruders.

The result’s a bleakly hopeless view of human nature that the finale, whereas cracking the door to an additional growth of the story, fails to refute. In that context, the introduction of faith as a central theme makes good sense: Who wants aliens, when perception has at all times been unmatched in its skill to show man towards his brother?

Bird Box Barcelona
Not Rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Netflix.