‘Songbird’ Review—Bleak and Exploitative

Film critics tend to have very complex opinions on the movies they watch. In my case, I can sum up my thoughts on this film in two words: TOO SOON.

Adam Mason helms Songbird, a dystopian thriller about the coronavirus pandemic four years in. The virus has mutated into the infinitely more lethal COVID-23, and infected people are forced into Q-zones resembling concentration camps.

Nico (KJ Apa) is a courier who is one of the few people immune to the virus. After a breakout, he must race across town and save his girlfriend, Sara (Sofia Carson), from being taken to a Q-zone. And with a Michael Bay-produced film about the current pandemic, you can’t really expect something much better than garbage.

Let’s put aside the fact that this movie was made during an ongoing health crisis. Because while I have not read any other reviews of this film, I’m pretty sure many of them are about how this is not the film we need right now and how it’s very exploitative. While both are true, let’s first take a look at the film on its own.

This is a very disposable, unengaging movie. It takes the pandemic-driven hyperlink cinema of Contagion and mixes it with the premise of I Am Legend, with our main character being the only immune person in a world wiped out by a virus.

At times, it can feel like Mason is attempting to create a world straight out of a Philip K. Dick story with the advancements in virus-detecting technology. In this film, characters have a smartphone app that scans their faces to test for viruses and a device next to their doors that kills viruses on packages.

While there are a few interesting ideas that would be great if they were adopted in the real world, Songbird offers little more than those ideas, with several storylines that offer very little besides standard melodrama and half-developed characters with journeys that barely feel resolved by the end.

Nico is also a bland protagonist. The audience learns nothing about him besides the fact that he’s an immune courier with a girlfriend that he loves. The romance is a passable aspect of the film because the love that Nico and Sara have is believable and there is a history between them. Besides that, Nico is a very boring person.

Apa doesn’t portray the character with enough screen presence or charisma, and it would have been much more enjoyable to watch him on screen if he were more of an optimist looking at the world in a way that is different from everyone else.

The film doesn’t have nearly enough tension or action to be engaging. There is an attempt, with a race-against-the-clock scenario that fails because the window of time is very large and the time limit is unclear. When the movie does have action, it’s directed poorly and not nearly dynamic or unique enough to stick.

I struggle to recall how many of the other storylines went because it’s very difficult to root for these characters. The film also has a moment where a character comes out of nowhere to save Nico and does not appear again for the rest of the film. It was random and particularly peculiar.

Lorne Balfe provides an acceptable musical score, but this film lacks any ingenuity. It feels like a stomach-lurching case of predictive programming and taking the current pandemic and making a film that provides so little escapism or entertainment was just a terrible idea.

Songbird is a film that you should not watch. Many of us, including myself, have a lot of anxiety over our situation with the film coming out in the midst of a second wave. Vaccines are being approved this week and a movie about a real-life virus that has taken so much away from so many people is not a comforting watch.

It was inevitable that Hollywood would make a film about the coronavirus. I suspect we will be getting many more in the coming years. I can’t promise that I won’t write a film about the pandemic. But this film approaches it in a bleak and exploitative fashion that would be bad even if it weren’t about a real pandemic and were released ten years down the line.

This is not an exciting thriller. It’s not a feel-good movie. It’s not a dark, depressing movie. It honestly doesn’t know what it wants to be, so it took many elements and styles from superior films and we ended up with a movie you’re more likely to roll your eyes at than enjoy.

On another note, the title Songbird never comes into play during the film.

Grade: ★★☆☆☆ [4/10, D+]

Rating: PG-13 for violence including some bloody images, sexual material, partial nudity and some strong language