Bird Box: For The Birds? Or Something More...

Post-apocalyptic storytelling on screen can often and ironically come off as far more far-fetched and doomed, so to speak, than the freaky future contemplated as now - and Bird Box is no exception. Directed by Susanne Bier and adapted from the novel penned by rocker Josh Malerman of the Detroit band High Strung, Bird Box, along with John Krasinki's A Quiet Place released earlier this year, may perhaps in their dual confounding logic, be more illuminating and fascinating as sci-fi/horror genre cultural artifacts.

Sandra Bullock stars in Bird Box as the fiercely independent artist, designated feminist protagonist and single mother by choice, Malorie. Caught up suddenly in late stage pregnancy as a mystery toxic atmosphere sweeps across the planet precipitating mass unexplained suicide everywhere, Malorie joins a group of terrified humans fleeing to the safety of a barricaded nearby home. And after collectively figuring out that indiscriminate insanity is caused by viewing a mystery entity inciting the plague, they all don blindfolds. 

But after the birth of her child as well as that of another cloistered woman there, followed by the eventual death of everyone else months later, Malorie escapes with the two toddlers - and a couple of canaries referred to in the title - to a reported safe haven miles away across forests, seas and death-defying rapids. And yes, all the while blindfolded against the menacing plague - which has progressed into inexplicably turning some selective humans into assistant assassins as well. And all the while with no feasible explanation whatsoever, as to why fleeing blindfolded into the wilderness wouldn't lead to their demise well before any invisible force in pursuit.

But taken instead as a socio-political 'see no evil, hear no evil' phenomenon in these chaotic present times, along with A Quiet Place and it's alternate sensory terror - monster aliens in pursuit through hearing - one might speculate about the more intimately visceral and personal terror emerging on screen. Say, in contrast to the preceding Cold War horror genre focused on cognitive human invasion as politically metaphorical mind control. 

In other words, the world we live in now, where fear and an overwhelming mass sense of powerlessness that is internal and frighteningly invasive through those very sensory channels. Counting intrusive, invisible, intimate and inescapable government deep state digital and cell phone surveillance - not to mention the progressive, seemingly irreversible death of the planet from environmental devastation. And the essential powerlessness of all of us against these doomsday scenarios for real - protective blindfold or not.

St. Agatha Movie Review
 
The horror genre's most effective weapon is what's going on just a cringe away in the real world. And if we're talking creepy proceedings behind closed doors at a Catholic convent and pertaining to the mental and physical torture of young unwed mothers while disappearing their newborns into a profiteering adoption farm - what more harrowing relevant reality than the scandal that ensued across the 20th century in such homes in Ireland. Counting sadism and mass graves, of both the girls and their children.
 
Not to mention the recent indictments here in this country, with the Church accused of being in collusion with the courts to send troubled juveniles off to detention centers run by the Church for profit - who didn't need to be there. In addition to the just released report that the Trump Administration is shipping among those thousands of caged immigrant children, to Bethany Christian Services - an adoption agency with ties to the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
 
And to conveniently bypass any political controversy like the right to life movement or Catholic Church culpability in Darren Lynn Bousman's nuns run amok horror spree, St. Agatha, the narrative is set back in 1957 rural Georgia, and the Church has severed ties with an apparently disobedient head nun (Carolyn Hennesy. Meanwhile, young expectant mother Mary (Sabrina Kern), opts to turn up at the convent maintained by a staff of sullen when not macabre nuns, until the birth of her child.
 
What ensues for the remainder of this deepening, darkly laced diabolical torture fest, is basically wildly wicked women at their worst, a maniacal generation gap standoff with those young terrorized female victims, and something best left to the decidedly warped imaginations out there having to do with, let's just say, weaponized cash and umbilical cords. Or something like that.

THE LOAD [Teret]: What Doesn't Kill You Makes You...Disappear

A tense, muted, never less than simultaneously grim and confounding, historically laced road movie venture into the heart of darkness of a disappeared country, The Load opts for subtlety over sensationalism. Directed by Serbian Ognjen Glavonić, the story follows truck driver Vlada (Leon Lucev), who appears to be transporting an unknown, secretive cargo across a terrifying landscape from Kosovo to Belgrade, being subjected to NATO bombing in 1999. Not only bombing the population, NATO is likewise conducting a propaganda blitz, dropping leaflets across the land intended to convince civilians that destruction, invasion and occupation are their glorious democratic future. While The Load has been cited as referencing the highway thrillers Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, and Williams Friedkin’s retelling, Sorcerer.  

Glavonić, who has emerged from a young, post-communist Yugoslavia generation of filmmakers, appears most personified here in a despondent, directionless nomadic youth Vlada picks up along the way. An aspiring musician who plays some of his songs on a cassette for Vlada - when asked about the group, the youth's reply provides a stinging metaphor expressing the fate of the broken, disappeared and Western imperialist devoured Yugoslavia itself: My group no longer has a name, because the band broke up when everyone was gone.

While the inferences of The Load remaining ambiguous regarding casualties of war and culpability, have been referred to as a praiseworthy artistic preference - perhaps the truth resides elsewhere. No less than that this Serbian-French collaboration is an ironic co-production between that NATO invader/exploiter and victim country. Which might update and expand that Winston Churchill axiom: History is written by the victor's filmmakers.

Likewise an intriguing update that might have made for an insightful postscript, would have been the inclusion of the current shadow CIA regime change factory known by its front name CANVAS, and secretly functioning in the present time in Serbia. And where self-declared coup president of Venezuela Juan Guaido had been trained to do just that. While preceded by their regime change factory operation that succeeded in the imprisonment there of Socialist President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes, a subsequent Hague trial and imprisonment over the course of many years  - and with Milosevic ultimately declared innocent long after he had died in prison at the Hague, for lack of adequate medical care for a serious heart condition.

The Load is a feature of the 2019 New Directors/New Films, and more information is at filmlinc.org/festivals/new-directors-new-films-2019.

 Prairie Miller