This review contains spoilers

I don't know about anyone else, but for the past month I have seen post after post on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook about this new film that I'm sure everyone has heard of by now — "Bird Box." I don't have Spotify Premium, but the number of "Bird Box"ads that I have been hearing every single day while listening to music has pushed me to my limit; I'm giving in and buying Premium. However, these ads are clearly doing their job, because it got to the point where I had heard and seen enough about "Bird Box"that I finally did cave and ended up watching it.

I have this app called Letterboxd where people can log movies that they have seen, comment on them, and rate them out of 5 stars. On this app, I gave "Bird Box" a solid 2, which was shockingly lower than its average rating of 3.1.

Don't get me wrong, this movie wasn't terrible — it had its ups and its downs — it just did not fulfill the hype that the ads had given it.

As an overall plus, this movie was like none other that I had seen before. The premise was unique, and they did a decent job at spicing up your typical "post-apocalyptic" trope. However, they could have taken it to another level and gone further with it.

To delve into this, there are people throughout the film that can physically look at the "creatures" without being driven to kill themselves, but we aren't given much information about them. The only real encounters the audience has with these superior beings are once at the grocery store and when the main characters finally let Gary into their house. At the grocery store, one of Charlie's coworkers is supposedly "insane," as he is trying to coax Charlie to let him into the grocery store, when the creature is in fact right behind him. Charlie instead goes outside and is killed by the creature, while his coworker strangely stays alive with no real explanation. Secondly, when Gary is let into the house, he briefly mentions how the patients at the mental hospital (that he had just come from) can look at the creatures without dying. It's no surprise that Gary ends up being one of those people, but once he is killed by Tom, they simply just move on from this whole phenomenon.

More "immune" people are seen again in the remainder of the movie, but they are almost brushed off as just another obstacle that Malorie and the children have to get around. It was not until a friend of mine made the inference that these "immune" people can see the creatures because they are already mentally ill themselves and do not need the creatures to push them to kill themselves since they're battling their own demons.

As interesting as this seems, it was not made clear within the film. Of course, this is just one person's insight, but if this is to be true, the writers could have touched upon it more. Bringing these people into the story but not really flooding them with their full potential was an absolute tease. Not only is mental illness such an important thing to talk about, but it also could have given the story more depth.

Asides from that, "Bird Box" was just two hours of intensity that was resolved with a happier ending. I found the ending relieving, as well as disappointing. It was a nice change of pace to have a thriller end smoothly, but it also was slightly anticlimactic becauseSandra Bullock's character had an almost instantaneous solution. Plus, once they got to safety, the movie immediately ended. I suppose there was no need to draw it out any longer, but it was still unsatisfactory.

Overall, I did enjoy watching the movie, but will stand by my word that it was not worth all of the hype that it was given.