![]() Similarly, there’s a lot of attention paid to the mechanics of this dystopian future. Short snippets suggest influencers profitting from the pandemic, but mostly it seems to exist to assure audience members that the film is down with the kids. However, the idea is never developed or explored. This is a potentially interesting angle in the midst of a pandemic – the idea of creating these virtual avatars as surrogates for human connection. Characters are constantly videoing themselves or watching videos of others. The film leans rather heavily on the idea of social media. The worldbuilding in Songbird seems largely derived from the dark id of the internet. It is also frustrating because so much of what Songbird establishes about this dystopian future is ultimately shallow and disconnected. It is frustrating because the film’s structure means that it takes almost forty minutes of this eighty-minute movie for the inciting incident to occur. This is both interesting and frustrating. The first half of Songbird is largely dedicated to worldbuilding, mapping out the space inhabited by the characters and charting their relationships to one another. Sara is trapped at home with her grandmother. Nico is immune to the virus, and so can travel relatively freely. Songbird is primarily driven by the relationship between bike courier Nico and his girlfriend Sara. Songbird is full of elements that never quite click or gel, of concepts and buzzwords and characters thrown into a jar and violently shaken with no regard for how well they are supposed to integrate with one another. The result is a shoddily made and vapid piece of work, that somehow feels even more vulgar than a full-throated exploitation film might. The film often feels like it was cobbled together over a weekend to ensure that it would be released at a point where it was still relevant and timely. In contrast, Songbird is an absurdly slipshod production. The Hunt was ultimately a standard genre movie that disguised itself as something more relevant, but it was reasonably well constructed. ![]() This is perhaps the biggest difference between something like The Hunt and something like Songbird. It makes grand gestures towards the current moment, importing all manner of iconography and language associated with the pandemic to give it a patina of relevance, but ultimately ties it to a fairly conventional story. However, like The Hunt, Songbird is ultimately something of a damp squib. Songbird and The Hunt are movies that position themselves as genre pieces with biting resonance to a highly charged and combustible situation. All of this sounds very crass and very charged, something similar to what happened with the release of The Hunt earlier in the year.
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