Critic Reviews

For people who just want more stories told in this world, and don’t mind leaving Bird Box’s initial characters behind, the spinoff’s small mysteries and shocks may be enough to occupy a Friday night or a lazy Sunday afternoon. But for people who want more depth out of their sad-dad-found-family horror stories, The Last of Us is already out there. Bird Box Barcelona just feels a little late to the game.

The film is an effective, thrilling, frightening horror, perfect for those who enjoyed Bird Box and are thrilled by the prospect of more.

While Bird Box Barcelona is only following the trend, it is too bad to see the spin-off try so hard to keep fans excited about the next chapter that it undercuts the emotional weight of its ending. So, while the film surpasses the original in every sense, it still gets dragged down by the needs of a franchise.

The film’s admirable attempts at preserving its enigmas, while finding the greatest unsettling effect in commonplace human fanaticism, offer an experience unique from Bier’s work with Bullock. But Bird Box Barcelona’s lack of grit and prevailing aversion to the gruesome realities of its own premise are a drag on the details that click.

Thanks to a couple of novel twists, it manages to outpace its predecessor in tension and originality—if not quite reinvigorate the franchise.

Bird Box Barcelona ekes by thanks to dependable and lived-in performances, but overstays its post-apocalyptic welcome across its almost two-hour duration.

The result is a bleakly hopeless view of human nature that the finale, while cracking the door to a further expansion of the story, fails to refute.

With Bird Box: Barcelona, as with any film of this outlandish ilk, suspension of disbelief and an appreciation of propulsively destructive action sequences is key. Just don’t expect too many fresh ideas.

The movie is technically accomplished, well-acted, atmospherically unsettling and certainly watchable. . . But as genre material, it’s generic.

Bird Box Barcelona expands the mythology in several new and fascinating directions, but it also makes the mistake of posing several bigger questions that it doesn't seem to want to answer.