![]() ![]() Their plan is thrown for a loop when Lita falls ill, because it means that Sara is now also destined to be picked up by the sanitation department, which is run by greasy, gleefully murderous Emmett Harland (Peter Stormare), a role that allows Stormare to chew scenery in amusingly Stormare-like fashion. Nico and Sara engage in lots of lovey-dovey conversations on their phones and through her residence’s front door, both of them pining for the day that he can get her an immunity bracelet and they can run off to, well, somewhere on the other side of the makeshift wall surrounding L.A. How these perpetually quarantined Angelenos get adequate supplies of food or household goods is one of many lingering issues ignored by Songbird, which instead focuses on Nico’s from-afar romance with Sara (Sofia Carson), a budding artist holed up in an apartment with her grandma Lita (Elpidia Carrillo). ![]() Still, at least the film is free of producer Bay’s more frustrating signatures, such as cornball humor, not-so-subtle racism, and incessant product placement, the last of which is presumably absent because this fictionalized pandemic has more or less destroyed capitalist enterprise. What one wouldn’t give for a static establishing shot at any point during this helter-skelter affair. Such an aesthetic is at once apt and unbearable, with Mason’s camera lurching about to create a phony impression of anxiety and tension. Thanks to a story constructed around ongoing COVID-19 restrictions, Songbird largely keeps its characters physically separated, communicating via video chats that, like so much of the action, is filmed in extreme shaky-handheld close-up. What’s become of Amazon, Walmart, and their titanic industry brethren is a question left unanswered by Songbird, which provides just enough particulars about its set-up to keep the material moving forward but otherwise remains limited in scope, detail, and imagination, refusing to impart a larger sense of the ramifications of this plague on the world. Sweaty, scruffy, floppy-haired, and often shirtless, Nico is a fun-loving rebel who plays basketball on desolate freeways and chats jokingly with his boss Lester ( Craig Robinson), whose private delivery service has an apparent monopoly in the City of Angels. In this reality, the only people free to roam about as they please are those immune to the virus, such as Nico ( Riverdale’s KJ Apa), a “munie” bike messenger who drops off packages at houses by leaving them in mailbox-like UV sanitation units. As directed and co-written by Adam Mason, it’s a middling genre effort with nothing to offer except the terrifying idea that COVID-19 will never be vanquished, resulting in uninhabited streets, ubiquitous gas-masked military patrols, and Americans living out their lives in scary isolation, disconnected from everything and everyone they care about and existing in a state of constant panic that their smartphones’ virus scans will be positive, leading to their abduction by “sanitation” units who’ll deposit them in internment camps known as Q-zones. 11) has been designed solely to prey upon our current fears about the pandemic nightmare, delivering cliched characters, formal flash, and a mundane race-against-time narrative that wouldn’t warrant the least bit of attention if not for its contextual timeliness. A Cloverfield-style B-movie in which human contact is the real monster, Songbird (on VOD on Dec. Reality, though, isn’t the province of Bay, who as usual goes for the exploitative jugular. ![]() That’s not exactly a premise fit for escapism, and with an actual COVID-19 vaccine on the imminent horizon, it’s also a conceit that makes this Michael Bay-produced thriller feel at once of-the-moment and slightly antiquated, presenting a vision of a post-apocalyptic near future that’s already been reduced to the realm of fantasy. The first feature film shot in Los Angeles during the pandemic, Songbird imagines a 2024 in which the airborne virus has mutated and mankind is suffering through its fourth year of a never-ending quarantine crisis. ![]()
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