Real-life events beget art or fantasies of what life could be. 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow pondered what the world would look like undergoing very extreme weather events. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2011 movie, Contagion suddenly jumped in downloads and on top of the Netflix top ten watch list. Chalk it up to a terrifying situation being relatively new, but thrillers and sci-fi films have always dipped into potentially terrifying aspects of our reality. They also try to invoke characterization that we can sympathize with and just maybe a path forward. Songbird is a film that is co-written by director Adam Mason and writer Simon Boyes. It takes place within a world in 2024 where COVID-19 has mutated into COVID-23. The world is under strict lockdown, packages are delivered and sterilized with machines, and everybody has a temperature app that they take daily.
If you are sick, then you’re taken to a Q-Zone by the Sanitation department, where you’re left for dead or get better. There are hints at resistance, but it’s just that and not really expounded upon. Those that are immune to the virus have to wear a yellow bracelet to roam out and about. That’s a lot of dystopian themes that this movie could explore and give a commentary on as a cautionary tale. Instead, at the heart is a love story. Nico Price (KJ Apa) is a motorcycle courier who is saving up money to go to an island called Big Sur. He’s looking to go away with his girlfriend Sarah (Sofia Carson) with whom he cannot have physical contact. Songbird shows different types of relationships during this stage of forced quarantine. William and Piper Griffith (Bradley Whitford, Demi Moore) are a married couple who run an underground business supplying illegal immunity bracelets. May (Alexandra Daddario) is an aspiring singer/songwriter who has an online admirer in Dozer (Paul Walter Hauser), a drone using, wheelchair-bound, war veteran.
Apa and Carson’s performances are good with what they have to work with. This futuristic Romeo and Juliet motif drives the film alongside some loose implementations, as what connection really means when you’re in a pandemic. Sarah’s interactions with her grandmother, Lita (Elpidia Carrillo) feel real in that she has to choose between this love she feels deeply for and family. However, choices in who and how the virus infects people come off a little confusing. Michael Bay served as a producer and directed the action sequences on this film. Once the second act arrives and Nico decides to save Sarah, it feels like his movie. Complete with the camera framing of characters and the quick, frenetic pacing in which it goes.
One major problem with Songbird is that a lot of this movie feels like The Purge without the political strands to match. There’s a curfew during the night that people where people can’t be out in the streets. Characters look out of their peepholes while the antagonists make threats. A government ran force comes to places of residence and takes people away. Never mind the bad optics of a political hand/secret police engaging in the abduction of citizens. Emmett Harland (Peter Stormare) is the head of this sanitation department. His characterization is almost cartoon-like. He serves as the foil to Nico and Sarah, but as the audience sees his motivations, you realize that Emmett is just there to be a roadblock and nothing else. Songbird only elects to sit to tell the audience why the love story matters and not so much the enormous factors as to why it has to be this way.
If anything, the martial conflict between William and Piper is the one relationship that has the most conflict to it. Their daughter, Emma (Lia McHugh) has an auto-immune disease, and she has to live within a world where simple exposure to an airborne virus could kill her instantly. The talks she has with her mother are probably the best emotional beat that this movie has, but it doesn’t choose to explore that means on a larger level. Songbird suffers because it hints at a bigger world with repercussions, but has no interest in investing to explore it. A bunch of side plots try to connect the characters in a way that feels organic, including an adultery angle.
While the love story aspect of Songbird is a significant aspect of the film, it also feels like it’s a simple way out of more complex issues that the movie doesn’t address. There are real ethical issues of rounding up sick people and forcing them into camps. Also, mass surveillance and a potential society caste system regarding who is immune to the virus and who is not. We have two star-crossed lovers in a search of paradise with a hint at a crumbling world around them with little concern for it.
Photo Credit: STX Entertainment
