Songbird makes no secret of the fact that it’s inspired by current events. It’s touted in marketing materials as “the first feature film to be made during COVID-19 in Los Angeles,” and unfolds in a dystopian near-future in which the virus has mutated into the far deadlier COVID-23 strain. “Remember the good old days of fake news? The real news is worse!” a disembodied voice squawks in the opening montage — and cheesy as that line is, it isn’t all that difficult to imagine a scenario in which our current situation only continues to go from bad to worse to even worse.
All of this should make Songbird feel eerily relevant, and from time to time its world does have the ring of familiarity. The abandoned streets don’t look as alien as they might have a year ago. Wistful conversations about “the way things were” echo ones so many of us have had over the past several months. There’s a scene where one person removes another’s face mask, and it registers as a shocking violation. But timeliness can’t create depth or insight where there is none, and for all its characters like to prattle on about what really matters, Songbird itself remains fixated on all the wrong things. Read more…
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