Delving into the ending of the new Bird Box movie on Netflix (2025)

Bird Box Barcelona didn't do as well on Netflix as the record-breaking first movie, but it lived up to Bird Box by leaving viewers with a lot of questions.

Set at the same time as the first movie, the spin-off moves the action to Barcelona and focuses on a new group of survivors in the early days of the outbreak, while giving us more insight into the deadly unseen creatures.

Two of these survivors, Sebastián (Mario Casas) and his daughter Anna (Alejandra Howard), have a closer connection to the creatures than the other survivors know, spelling trouble for the likes of Claire (Georgina Campbell), Sofia (Naila Schuberth) and Octavio (Diego Calva).

But if you were too busy hiding behind a cushion, we're here to help by explaining the major reveals of Bird Box Barcelona and what the ending means for the series going forward.

Early on in Bird Box Barcelona, it's revealed that Sebastián isn't actually trying to hide from the creatures. He's already seen them and he's a "seer", like Gary (Tom Hollander) in the first movie, and he believes his mission is to show the creatures to all survivors.

Whenever he does so, Sebastián sees a ball of light coming out from the creatures' latest victim, which he takes to mean that he 'saved' them. At least that's what his daughter Anna tells him – although she's not actually his daughter.

As in the first movie, Bird Box Barcelona cuts back to the early days of the apocalypse. Initially Sebastián was trying to keep Anna safe, but one day, they're captured by Padre Esteban (Leonardo Sbaraglia) who forces them to see. Anna dies by suicide after seeing them, but Sebastián sees the creatures as "angels".

From this moment on, Sebastián saw Anna back by his side and went about his supposedly holy mission to show everybody what they're missing by wearing blindfolds. Across the course of the movie though, he begins to lose faith that the creatures are all they're cracked up to be.

This realisation doesn't come until he's killed most of the group of survivors he finds himself with, though. However, when he tricks Octavio into seeing the creatures, Sebastián doesn't see a light coming out of Octavio. "What if I'm not the shepherd? What if I'm the wolf?" he tells 'Anna'.

Claire works out what Sebastián did to Octavio and runs away with Sofia, but he catches up to them. After Claire is knocked unconscious falling onto a piece of scaffolding, Sebastián goes to remove Sofia's blindfold before he stops himself.

He then commits himself to taking Claire and Sofia to the safe sanctuary at Montjuïc, where Sofia was heading with her mother before she got separated. Understandably, Claire doesn't quite believe him, but he now knows who Anna really is: the creatures playing with his mind.

"Grief can break you. I thought I was chosen, but I was just broken," he tells Claire. It took leading a lot of people to their deaths to work it out, but at least he got there in the end, we suppose.

As they get to the tramway that will take them to Montjuïc, Padre Esteban and his group of followers arrive. Sebastián holds them off to allow Claire and Sofia to get to the tram to safety, but it comes at the cost of his life after he skewers himself and Padre Esteban with a metal pole.

Claire and Sofia make it to Montjuïc and are greeted by the military. Sofia is reunited with her mother and in the final scenes, it's revealed that the military is trying to work on a cure using the DNA of the seers as "the key to creating immunity".

But does Bird Box Barcelona reveal any more about these unseen creatures that we didn't know from the first movie?

A big complaint from some who watched the first movie was that Bird Box never revealed what the creatures really looked like.

Bird Box Barcelona doesn't reveal them either, but with Anna, it does at least give a clearer sense of how the creatures can manipulate somebody's mind that potentially leads them to die by suicide.

However, while it doesn't reveal what the creatures look like, it does expand on the mythology of the creatures that was established in the first movie.

In Bird Box, it's revealed that they take on the form of "your worst fears, your deepest sadness or your greatest loss". In the new movie, Octavio explains this by comparing it to the observer effect where looking at something changes it, but before you look at it, it could be anything.

"If somehow these creatures are some kind of quantum beings, maybe they don't even have a permanent state. Maybe they're changing, fluctuating all the time, until we hear them or we see them and then they take form based on us. Our fears, our grief, our pain," he notes.

It's why Sebastián initially sees them as angels, while another seer he comes across sees them as aliens who will "take us to the stars". The creatures can literally appear as anything to the observer, and what form they take appears to define whether that person dies by suicide or becomes a "seer".

As Claire later puts it to Sebastián: "Those things, they burrow into our brains. They take our beliefs, our fears and they twist them. They turn them into something they can use to manipulate you."

For Claire, this means the creatures try to manipulate her by mimicking her dead brother and for Sebastián, it's why the creatures appear as Anna as they know that by having her tell him their mission, he'll believe it and become their devoted follower.

It's possible though that by leaving "seers" around, the creatures could lead to their own downfall as the final scenes of Bird Box Barcelona reveal.

When Claire and Sofia make it to Montjuïc, the army doctor tells Claire that they're looking for a genetic alteration in a seer's DNA.

"In rare cases, extreme forms of stress can affect people's DNA, change it even," the doctor explains. This happened to Sebastián and his "extreme form" of stress was the grief at the loss of his daughter.

The military has hypothesised that if all seers share the same "epigenetic alteration", then this discovery could lead to a way to create immunity to the creatures' effects. They've already started experiments on rats, using a "seer compound" that has allowed them to see the creatures for 48 seconds before dying by suicide.

Given that Bird Box Barcelona ends more than four years before the end of Bird Box when things were still pretty rough in the world, it's possible that the military wasn't exactly successful with their experiments. (Maybe it just hadn't gotten to the US by that point.)

But if there's going to be another Bird Box movie, this is surely going to be a plot point that will be continued in the future.

Bird Box Barcelona is out now on Netflix.