‘Bird Box Barcelona’ Review: Blind Faith

In the mildly entertaining Sandra Bullock vehicle, “Bird Box,” alien invaders were presumed so fearsome to behold that all who gazed upon them immediately offed themselves. Possibly to save audiences from a similar fate, we were never permitted to see these terrors, leaving us as sightless as the movie’s scrabbling survivors.

Another day, another postapocalyptic hellscape. Transplanting the basic premise to Spain, the directors Àlex Pastor and David Pastor have come up with a spinoff feature, “Bird Box Barcelona,” minus Bullock but with the addition of a rather nifty — and depressingly credible — faith-based twist. Nine months after the aliens’ arrival, an engineer named Sebastián (Mario Casas) and his young daughter (Alejandra Howard) are searching for survivors in a city where the remaining humans are as feared as the invaders. Yet as Sebastián gains the trust of successive ragtag groups, he soon reveals a purpose that’s far more terrifying than robbery.

Shooting in and around Barcelona, the cinematographer Daniel Aranyó conjures an atmospheric dystopia of blasted buildings and ruined roadways. The dead and dying are everywhere, challenging the movie’s special-effects team to create ever-more-horrible avenues of self-harm. As Sebastián and an English psychologist (Georgina Campbell) seek refuge on a mountaintop fortress accessible solely by cable car, flashbacks illuminate the genesis of his twisted mission and the subtly shifting powers of the intruders.

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. In that context, the introduction of religion as a central theme makes perfect sense: Who needs aliens, when belief has always been unrivaled in its ability to turn man against his brother?

Bird Box Barcelona
Not Rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Netflix.