SONGBIRD | FILM REVIEW
Dir: Adam Mason (15, 84 mins)
A film about a coronavirus mutation and a continuation of the pandemic to an even worse state of affairs is hardly upbeat viewing, but Songbird is also shoddily scripted nonsense. KJ Apa stars as cycle courier Nico, crisscrossing a Covid-riven LA in 2024. The fascistic Department Of Sanitation, embodied by Peter Stormare, now moves those with the virus to a ghetto away from the uninfected, segregating the city as everyone checks in daily to see if they have the virus via an app.
Nico’s a ‘muni’, immune from the virus but still able to spread it, denoted by a yellow wristband like you’d get at Alton Towers or Clwb Ifor Bach. He drops off packages at a posh residence that houses Demi Moore, her damaged immune system daughter and Bradley Whitford the obviously dodgy dad. They’ve got a sideline selling immunity bracelets on the black market to those who can afford them. Nico’s girlfriend Sara (Sofia Carson) lives with her mother, but they’ve never properly met: a real Covid love affair with no touching. When her mother contracts the disease, Nico decides to get her out of LA and away from the risks whatever the costs.
Unlike Host, this does not use the restrictions of lockdown filming well: poorly drawn characters interact separately in different films. Alexandra Daddario has a music channel watched by army vet Paul Walter Hauser, who also flies drones for Craig Robinson’s courier business in a vague nod to connecting characters; nasty Whitford is having a lockdown-breaking obsessive affair with Daddario, too.
It’s all a jumbled mess, delivered with little style and panache by writer/director Adam Mason, that fails to offer any real insight into the pandemic now, or any critique or logic to how it has escalated. There’s a grimmer, more political film to be made here about class and abuse of power, in the style of The Purge, but apart from an alarming, attention-grabbing opening about the prospect of Covid mutating and getting worse, Songbird is empty, banal and opportunistic.
On Amazon Prime now
words KEIRON SELF