Bird Box

Birds of Paradise

a couple hours of imagining Sandra bullock be a badass? it's heaven.

This was compelling, but overall I felt it tried unsuccessfully to lift itself out of the depressive, hopeless morass it so convincingly set up. The world Malerman presents really struggles to maintain suspense, because the only realistic expectation is that the ending will be “And they all died. The end.”

That, together with some really harrowing themes of child abuse, kept me from rating this four stars. I did like it, and while the premise seems to inevitably doom our characters unless there's colossal amounts of dumb luck on their side, it did serve to frame some spine-tingling set pieces that will be hard to forget!