In their innocent faces, the weight of that faith becomes even more clear. The concept of believing in a better world without being able to see it applies not just to the stark visual of the blindfolded Malorie, but particularly to Boy and Girl (Julien Edwards and Vivien Lyra Blair). It’s a change in attitude heavily informed by Tom’s insistence that love, not fear, should define how he, Malorie, and the children live their lives. Will Malorie learn to accept that there is a future ahead, and that the harsh reality of right now isn’t all there is? In the “present” of Bird Box, chronicling Malorie and the kids’ harrowing trip down the river, what starts as a bid for survival becomes a leap of faith. It’s a point of view that becomes increasingly persistent as his and Malorie’s own relationship develops. He believes survival doesn’t only mean getting through the day, but maintaining hope and sustaining relationships. Trevante Rhodes’ sensitive optimist Tom provides the strongest counterpoint to Malorie’s detached pragmatism. Charlie (Lil Rel Howery), an aspiring writer, tends toward end-times thinking. Selfish lawyer Douglas (John Malkovich) trusts no one, always assumes the worst, and liberally self-medicates with booze. The people we meet in the flashback scenes each have their own reaction to what’s happening. Bird Box switches between their experience and the beginning of the epidemic five years earlier, when a then-pregnant Malorie first sought refuge with a group of others. The film opens with her preparing her two children, efficiently named Boy and Girl, for a dangerous, blindfolded boat journey toward a commune that promises security. As the established social order disintegrates, those left behind have to decide whether to fight back, remain hopeful, or put their heads down and simply survive.īird Box’s protagonist, Malorie (Sandra Bullock), is firmly of the pure survival school when we meet her. And so people cover their windows and blindfold themselves when they’re outside. In the film, seeing the evil force causes people to either kill themselves or go homicidally insane. The urge-even necessity-of looking away is also what powers the hit Netflix thriller Bird Box, which is about a deadly evil that spreads across the world like a plague. ![]() Sometimes, in the name of self care, it feels as if the best thing you can do to keep from losing your mind is to just look away. If you’ve logged onto social media or listened to the news at all in the last few years, you’ve probably felt a certain level of burnout from seeing so much human suffering repeated, analyzed, and debated. ![]() They can be just as overwhelming in the form of injustice, systemic racism, poverty, genocide, or any societal ill you care to name. The struggle, he writes, “is against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”ĭark forces don’t have to be actual demons. But when the apostle Paul brings up the concept in Ephesians 6, his description is fairly vague. The term “spiritual warfare” often brings up wild images of exorcisms or other over-the-top supernatural encounters where believers confront evil spirits.
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