Review: ‘Songbird,’ the most controversial movie of 2020, is deadly dull

When the trailer for “Songbird” was released in October, the new romantic thriller – a coronavirus-themed quickie shot over 17 days in Los Angeles this summer and set in the dystopian near future of 2024 during the fourth year of a pandemic lockdown – was met with controversy and condemnation. Called insensitive, tone deaf and in bad taste for its depiction of a world in which those suffering from the new, far deadlier COVID-23 virus strain are being rounded up by armed “sanitation” workers and forced into quarantined ghettos called Q Zones, the film was panned even before it came out – which is the kind of publicity that money can’t buy. To read the online comments, you’d think producer Michael Bay, who was accused of exploiting our present misery for profit, must have been chuckling with delight while sitting on a couch made of cash and human skin.

One thing no one said about it (merely because they hadn’t seen it yet) was that it was boring.

The shocking theme of Q Zones and armed public health workers enforcing imprisonment on innocent sick people, while an offensive caricature, is merely a backdrop to “Songbird’s” insipid main narrative of forbidden young love: Nico (K.J. Apa), a hot law student turned bike messenger is in lurve with the equally hot Sara (Sofia Carson), although they have never met. There’s lots of embarrassing pining for each other over FaceTime and from opposite sides of a locked door. Nico, who has an immunity to the disease, is allowed to circulate outdoors with his fellow “munies.” I’ll say one nice thing about the film: It effectively evokes its apocalyptic setting, probably because every other Angeleno was observing lockdown at the time the crew was out shooting. (A stop-work order from actors union SAG-AFTRA, over safety concerns, was issued and then quickly rescinded before shooting began on the low-budget picture.)

But when Sara’s grandmother, with whom she lives, suddenly falls deathly ill, authorities are alerted (via a phone app that periodically tests citizens) and descend on their apartment to cart Sara off to the Q Zone – and Grandma, now deceased, to the morgue. Never mind that Sara does not even appear to be sick, and might, in fact, be immune. “That’s not how it works,” says the cartoonishly villainous head of the Sanitation Department (Peter Stormare), a long-haired former garbageman – and munie – who rose through the ranks of the municipal bureaucracy as his supervisors died off and who now patrols the mean streets of L.A. with a switchblade. The character is laughable, not scary.

OK, garbageman, so how does it work?

Director Adam Mason, whom you never heard of, and who co-wrote the slapdash screenplay with Simon Boyes (Mason’s collaborator on the horror film “Hangman”), doesn’t really seem to care about world building, and there is precious little of anything that would help make this universe feel plausible, let alone inhabited by characters who are fully fleshed enough to care about – whose misery and will to survive, in short, feels remotely recognizable to those of us who are living it.

There are a few additional supporting characters: Craig Robinson as the head of Nico’s courier company; Paul Walter Hauser as a shut-in techie who roams the city, virtually, via a camera-equipped drone; Demi Moore and Bradley Whitford as unhappily married dealers in black-market immunity wristbands; and Alexandra Daddario as the mistress of Whitford’s character and an aspiring online singer (also, presumably, the inspiration for the film’s dumb title).

I’ll say one other nice thing: The film isn’t terribly long. You’ll keep waiting for the suspense to kick in. Spoiler alert: It never really does, except feebly, after about an hour and 15 minutes. And then, unceremoniously, it’s over.