5 Unanswered Questions From ‘Bird Box Barcelona’ (2023)

Bird Box Barcelona (2023) is the long awaited sequel to Bird Box (2018), the most watched horror movie in Netflix history. Premiering on July 14, the sequel follows a new cast of characters living in the fallout of a worldwide extinction event caused by unseen creatures. Basically, when humans make eye contact with whatever the creature is, they become instantly suicidal. This sequel follows survivors of the Bird Box apocalypse in Barcelona.

Bird Box Barcelona Plot Summary

Warning: spoilers ahead.

Sebastián (Mario Casas) is a Catholic man just trying to survive with his daughter in post-apocalyptic Spain. When he meets a group of survivors living in a fallout shelter, he helps them come up with a plan to meet other survivors and find a safe community on top of Mount Montjuïc. However, the other survivors don’t know that Sebastián has an ulterior motive. He believes that the suicidal psychosis brought on by whatever the Bird Box creatures are is a good thing and he goes out of his way to force people to “see”. Sebastián and his daughter refer to this as “saving” people, or setting their souls free. The audience sees that Sebastián can actually see the light leaving people’s bodies and going to heaven after they die.

It’s revealed through flashbacks that Sebastián is immune to the Bird Box entity and his daughter is a hallucination. Anna actually passed away some time ago and the event has caused Sebastián to lose his mind. He constantly sees and hears Anna instructing him to force other survivors to “see”. There are other survivors who, like Sebastián, are immune to the Bird Box creatures. They are known as “seers” and are also known to attack other survivors and force them to gaze at the malevolent entity.

However, through his time with the survivors from the fallout shelter, Sebastián grows close to the German child Sofia, who reminds him of Anna. His relationship with Sofia causes him to second guess his actions. At the end of the movie, Sebastián tries to redeem himself and gives his life to allow Claire and Sofia to escape from a gang of seers.

The end of Bird Box Barcelona shows Claire and Sofia reaching the top of Mount Montjuïc by gondola. There, they are greeted by a community of survivors, including Sofia’s mother. Claire discovers that the community has captured a “seer” and is conducting experiments trying to come up with a vaccine to give everyone immunity to the creatures.

What causes the Bird Box creatures to appear?

In both Bird Box (2018) and Bird Box Barcelona (2023) there are no hints given as to what causes the sudden appearance of the Bird Box creatures. Seemingly all at once the entire planet is affected by the creatures, but no precipitating event is mentioned. The seers’ delusional explanations of divine intervention or an alien invasion are the only mention of the cause behind the mass extinction event.

What do the Bird Box creatures look like?

We are never shown what the Bird Box creatures look like. One of the survivors, Octavio (Diego Calva), guesses that the reason the animals are invisible is because they have no permanent state as a result of being “quantum beings”. He explains that in quantum mechanics “all states are possible until observed.” This means that the animal can take any form while people are blinded, but once they “see” the animals would have one permanent form — like Schrödinger’s cat. This explains why Sebastián thinks the Bird Box creature is divine but others have experienced it as an alien entity.

Why are some people immune to the Bird Box creatures?

A main part of the plot of Bird Box Barcelona is that Sebastián and a small group of other survivors are immune to the Bird Box creatures. Called seers, these survivors seem to be holding on to different delusions, like Sebastián and Esteban (the priest and leader of a group of seers) believing that it is a divine being and another seer Sebastián encounters saying it is alien. It is not revealed why some people are immune to the creature. The end of the film hints that there is an epigenetic explanation for the immunity which the survivors at Mount Montjuïc hope will lead them to develop a vaccine.

Why do “seers” turn on other survivors?

Even though there was no communication between the survivors in the United States and Spain because of the apocalyptic events of Bird Box (2018) and Bird Box Barcelona (2023), both films showed people with immunity that turned on other survivors and forced them to gaze at the creatures. This suggests that immunity was happening everywhere and that some kind of psychosis was causing survivors to turn on each other, however what exactly this is is never explained. The “seer” from the original Bird Box film is memorable because it became one of the most popular memes from the movie:

What happened to the survivors from the original Bird Box movie?

At the end of the original movie Malorie (Sandra Bullock) and the two children reach the safety of a community of survivors living in a former school for the blind. No information is given on the American survivors from Bird Box (2018) in the sequel.

Further reading:

• 19+ Movies With Unreliable Narrators
• 33+ Pandemic/Epidemic Movies: The Best Virus Outbreak Films
• 10+ Best Bird Horror Movies