“Why are they doing this, the birds?” — the question on everyone’s mind in this movie that nobody—I’d argue not even the director himself—seems to have an answer for. What was interesting about this movie was how stark of a plot switch happens once the horror takes off. I enjoyed the slice-of-life rom com the first half of the movie led us through (the opening scene at the bird shop was a brilliant introduction to our two leads, Mitch and Melanie), and the switch to inexplicable bird attack-based horror in the second half, despite all the bird imagery all throughout the film, is quite jarring. For all the successful visual suspense Hitchcock builds in the sequences leading up to attack sequences, such as the scene on the jungle gym, I was a bit underwhelmed watching the attack sequences. I don’t think we needed more gore or anything like that per se, but I think a conventional movie score could’ve better heightened the stakes of the attacks and made this horror movie more… well, scary!

That all being said, it’s clear Hitchcock is a great visual filmmaker, and the characters are well-drawn. This plot is unhinged, though, and while I’d be down for that in the hands of a great filmmaker like Hitchcock, I was a bit ambivalent on the bird attacks themselves. I think a score could’ve gone a long way.