'Songbird' is a COVID-inspired thriller that's scared of all the wrong things

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.

Director Adam Mason (who also wrote the film with Simon Boyes) quickly establishes that we're in 2024, and that Los Angeles has been under strict lockdown for four years and counting. Each resident is subject to daily health checks via mobile phone, after which the healthy are left to remain indoors for another day and the infected are whisked off to "Q-Zones" — overcrowded slums from which no one ever seems to return. The only people still allowed to roam the streets are "Munies," those immune to the virus who have special yellow bracelets marking them as such. So the Munies take on tasks like transporting packages and enforcing quarantine laws.

One such Munie is Nico (KJ Apa). Formerly a paralegal, he is now a courier who spends his free time working on his washboard abs and mooning over a long-term girlfriend (Sara, played by Sofia Carson) he's only ever hung out with via video chat. Neither of them have been burdened with anything like a personality, but it doesn't matter; they're in love. The only thing keeping them going is the dream of escaping to Big Sur, which has remained blissfully untouched by the plague, somehow. There are a lot of unexplained "somehow"s in Songbird, which might not be so noticeable if the film weren't trying so hard to present itself as an extrapolation of our own current lived experiences.

The sense of disconnect only intensifies once the plot kicks in: Sara's grandmother Lita (Elpidia Carrillo) falls sick, so Nico sets out on a desperate hunt for two counterfeit Munie wristbands that'll allow them to avoid the Q-Zone. But wait — isn't it a horrible idea to try and pass off a sick, contagious person as a healthy one in the middle of an airborne pandemic? Okay, fine, so they're desperate to stay out of the Q-Zone. What exactly is the Q-Zone, though? Who created it and why? Wouldn't it make more sense to just leave Sara and Lita to ride out the disease at home? Hang on, can you rewind to the part where the government got it together enough to create an app that diagnoses coronavirus with a click of a phone camera?

SONGBIRD Credit: STXfilms

But no, no, never mind, there's no time for questions. COVID-23 kills within 48 hours and the authorities will be at Sara's in mere minutes, so Nico must zip around town on a motorcycle, chase bad guys through hallways, engage in several generic-looking fistfights, and break into a private home where an immunocompromised tween happens to live. (Boo, hiss, Nico!) He faces off against an evil government employee (Peter Stormare, all but twirling a mustache) who is hell-bent on getting Sara and Lita into the Q-Zone because that's just what he does. And a shady rich couple (Bradley Whitford and Demi Moore), who have their own subplot involving an aspiring singer (Alexandra Daddario), who has her own subplot involving a tech-savvy shut-in (Paul Walter Hauser), who happens to know Nico's boss (Craig Robinson), and...wait, where were we going with this?

Oh, right. "We're all just trying to protect the ones we love," one character says to another in the middle of a tense confrontation, and that seems to be the larger point Songbird is trying to make. But that typically relatable idea takes on a sour tang when even the good guys seem willing to throw everyone else's safety to the wind in this attempt to "protect the ones we love." At one point a man sets out to commit a murder, and his wife is upset only that he's putting their family at risk by stepping outside. At another, a woman's decision to let her live-in housekeeper return to her own home after three years is framed not as an eat-the-rich moment but as a heartwarming display of emotional growth.

And let's not forget, again, that our hero's end goal is to smuggle a highly contagious person into a remote community with no infections. "I realize now we weren't delivering packages. We were delivering hope," Nico says in a sappy voiceover that closes the movie. That seems to be what Songbird wants to do, too. It conjures a vision of the pandemic that's dangerous enough to be exciting in a cool way, rather than terrifying in a mundane way, and suggests the spiritual cure is love. But its small, selfish version of love is snake oil at best, and poison at worst. Best to leave this package unopened on the stoop.

Songbird is now streaming on iTunes, Google Play, FandangoNOW, and more.