COVID-themed ‘Songbird’ shocking and very boring
When the trailer for “Songbird” came out in October, it was met with controversy and condemnation. The new romantic thriller is a coronavirus-themed quickie shot over 17 days in Los Angeles this summer and set in the dystopian near-future of 2024, during the fourth year of a pandemic lockdown.
Called insensitive, tone-deaf and in bad taste for its depiction of a world in which those suffering from the new, far deadlier COVID-23 virus strain are being rounded up by armed “sanitation” workers and forced into quarantined ghettos called Q Zones, the film was panned even before it came out, which is the kind of publicity that money can’t buy. To read the online comments, you’d think producer Michael Bay, who was accused of exploiting our present misery for profit, was chuckling with delight while sitting on a couch made of cash and human skin.
One thing no one said about it (merely because they hadn’t seen it yet) was that it was boring.
The shocking theme of Q Zones and armed public health
workers enforcing imprisonment on innocent sick people, while an offensive caricature, is merely a backdrop to “Songbird’s” insipid main narrative of forbidden young love. Nico (KJ Apa), a hot law student turned bike messenger, is in love with the equally hot Sara (Sofia Carson), although they have never met. There’s lots of embarrassing pining for each other over FaceTime and from opposite sides of locked doors.
But when Sara’s grandmother, with whom she lives, falls deathly ill, authorities are alerted (via a phone app that tests citizens) and descend on their apartment to cart Sara off to the Q Zone, and Grandma, now deceased, to the morgue. Never mind that Sara does not even appear to be sick, and may, in fact, be immune.
“That’s not how it works,” says the cartoonishly villainous head of the Sanitation Department (Peter Stormare), a former garbageman who rose through the ranks of the municipal bureaucracy as his supervisors died and who patrols the mean streets of L.A. with a switchblade. The character is laughable, not scary.
Director Adam Mason, who co-wrote the slapdash screenplay with Simon Boyes, doesn’t seem to care about world building, and there is precious little of anything that would help make this universe feel plausible.