85 min | PG-13 | December 11, 2020 | STXfilms
A mutated COVID-23 locks society indoors for a fourth straight year, and an immune courier races across a sealed Los Angeles to reach the woman he loves through a bolted door. The pandemic is real. The movie treats it as scenery.
Set during a fictional fourth year of pandemic lockdown, Songbird imagines a mutated COVID-23 that has driven society into permanent quarantine. Nico is a courier immune to the virus, which lets him move freely through a sealed Los Angeles. Sara is the woman he loves through a locked door, exposed and trapped inside her apartment building. The film wraps a romance, a corrupt-official subplot, and a black-market thriller around a virus that exists to manufacture stakes. What it never figures out is what any of it means.
KJ Apa plays Nico as an earnest courier who pedals through empty streets and talks to Sara through his phone. He delivers urgency without ever locating a person underneath it. Sofia Carson plays Sara confined to a single apartment, and her scenes consist mostly of fear and longing aimed at a camera. Bradley Whitford and Demi Moore play the Griffins, a wealthy couple selling forged immunity bracelets, and they perform their corruption with a smugness the script never earns. Peter Stormare plays Emmett Harland, the sanitation enforcer hunting the infected, and he chews through the role as a cartoon of menace. Craig Robinson appears as Nico’s dispatcher Lester and is given nothing but exposition to read aloud.
Adam Mason directs from a script he wrote with Simon Boyes, and the seams of a rushed production show in every frame. The cinematography leans on drone shots of vacant Los Angeles and handheld closeups crammed into single rooms, a structure dictated by isolated actors who never share physical space. Mason cuts between four storylines that refuse to connect, and the editing mistakes velocity for tension. The score pushes hard to tell you a scene matters when the scene has done nothing to deserve it. The production design dresses the dystopia in surveillance drones and hazmat suits without imagining how any of it functions.
Songbird takes a real catastrophe and repurposes it as set dressing for a generic chase. The virus is a plot device, the lockdown is an aesthetic, and the grief of an actual pandemic becomes a backdrop for forbidden romance. A serious film about isolation would sit with the loneliness. This one sprints past it toward a happy ending it has not built. The result is a thriller that exploits the moment without understanding it, fast and loud and hollow all the way down.