a review of 群鸟

𝖍𝖔𝖔𝖕𝖙𝖔𝖇𝖊𝖗 𝖝 𝖓𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙 𝖊𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙: This one always somewhat underwhelmed me based on the brief clips and trailers I'd seen, and now that I've seen the whole thing I understand why this movie doesn't really break down well into a handful of component images (birds menacingly perching, birds in Tippi Hedren's hair, repeat ad nauseam) to explain the whole. One thing that helps is Hitchcock establishing a slightly dreamlike quality to the way Hedren interacts with the film's world within the first hour; There's an eerie effortlessness to how she maneuvers herself into Suzanne Pleshette's confidence and Rod Taylor's family life, just kind of stepping into a spot that was somehow already there for her in both places. When the bird attacks start happening, they feel like a dream-metaphor for some undefined force of chaos that exists to blow apart this comfortable world Hedren has found. Weather disasters, disease pandemics, generalized societal paranoia, it's all there in the language used by the townspeople to discuss what's happening among themselves. I'm not certain that Hitchcock intended the birds as a metaphor for postwar anxiety, but they do work as one for this particular character's anxiety about her place in the world. With a couple of exceptions where the rear-projection or photographic compositing felt very obvious, I thought the special effects (especially the mix of real bird footage with puppets and such) were pretty effective, even if they didn't necessarily look completely "realistic." The subtle dream atmosphere helps the movie over the hump here as well.