Songbird
Songbird was clearly in a desperate rush to become the first pandemic thriller to be made during COVID times and, well, it shows. Adam Mason directs an idea that he and Simon Boyes wrote together during the early stages of the pandemic and they have managed to recruit a lot of recognisable star talent to help bring it to life.
Unfortunately, there’s just no real plot. Set five years into our future, COVID-19 has mutated into COVID-23 and the effects are even more lethal and deadly, resulting in the whole of the population being under home lockdowns. Only people who are immune are allowed to wander around and they wear yellow bracelets as proof. One of these lucky people is Nico (KJ Apa), who spends his days working as a courier. He has never met his girlfriend, Sara (Sofia Carson), but the two make sure to check in on Facetime now and then.
Arguably, Nico and Sara are the protagonists of this story: Sara’s grandmother becomes sick and Nico races to get Sara an immunity bracelet in order to stop her being shipped off to a quarantine camp. Yet, the entire storyline is spread extremely thin. Nico cycles around the city in the search for a bracelet – stopping off along the way to chat to Demi Moore and getting into a shootout – all within the time it takes for several ‘sanitation’ agents to walk up the stairs to Sara’s apartment. The timeline is ludicrous and really calls into question the effectiveness of the sanitation team.
This, as itself, is weak (but an effective attempt at telling some sort of story). Unfortunately, Songbird also tries to tell multiple other stories in its eighty-minute runtime, never giving any one story the attention it deserves. Alexandra Daddario, who does genuinely deserve to be in everything ever made, is the film’s unluckiest target. Doubling as a YouTube singing sensation and prostitute, her character is a veiled attempt at connecting a couple of other unnecessary characters (namely, those portrayed by Paul Walter Hauser and Bradley Whitford).
In an attempt to make some sort of stamp on the history of cinema, Songbird succeeds in doing little else worthy of note. It is a tiresome and uninspired thriller that only seeks to make the idea of a pandemic laughable, as well as plugging in a series of one-note character creations to further add insult to injury.