‘The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes’ Review: The Atrocity of Hope

It would’ve been so easy, and likely lucrative, for Lionsgate to craft a prequel to The Hunger Games that just let newcomer Tom Blyth, as young Coriolanus Snow, smolder his way through a forbidden romance with Rachel Zegler’s District 12 songstress Lucy Gray for two hours and call it a day. But nothing about Francis Lawrence’s The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is easy. Channeling Adam Driver more often than Donald Sutherland, Blyth’s version of Snow is a towering, asexual vulture of desperate ambitions, stemming from the character’s family flirting with complete bankruptcy and his education at a fascist prep school where graduation is dependent on what boils down to a school-wide game of Who Wants to Be a Eugenicist.

The school’s opioid-addicted headmaster, Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), announces that graduation is dependent on mentoring a Hunger Games tribute in the fine art of public relations. As it turns out, after nine years of televised murder festivals, the Capitol is starting to have second thoughts about letting children and teenagers kill each other for pleasure, and the higher ups in Panem’s government have hopes that the students can focus-group a way to once again strike ratings gold. And the head gamemaker of the 10th annual hunger games is Dr. Volumnia Gaul, who, in Viola Davis’s vividly menacing hands suggests a cross between Rotwang from Metropolis and Ralph Fiennes’s Amon Göth from Schindler’s List.

Perhaps the most memorable “romance” in Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, which is adapted by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt from the Suzanne Collins novel, is between Gaul and Snow, who suggest sociopaths sharing a waltz through the ivory towers of Panem across their scenes together. Snow slowly but surely learns to see the frightened, genetically inferior prey inside every human being and manipulate it for the elite. What passes for a love scene in the context of the film isn’t Snow rolling around in verdant fields with Lucy Gray, but Gaul dropping everything to seal up Snow’s deliberately ripped-open stitches after being attacked by a tribute.

That isn’t to say Zegler’s Lucy Gray isn’t a force to be reckoned with on her own. Beyond possessing a powerful, relentlessly defiant singing voice that the filmmakers wisely put to use early and often, Lucy Gray is smart enough to know that she’s being manipulated, and only gives an inch when it becomes obvious that her mentor, Coriolanus Snow, is one mistake away from ending up in the gutter alongside her. Though sweet toward each other, their relationship plays out with a remarkable amount of subtlety and cunning—the “moves and countermoves” that Sutherland gravely intoned about across the original films. Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is never so careless as to telegraph to the audience whether Snow’s concern over seeing Lucy in the games is about watching her in peril, or his dreams being put in peril.

You would be forgiven for thinking that maybe it’s both. The hour-long midsection of Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes shows us the Hunger Games competition, and while this has ironically been the weakest part of the earlier films, this one benefits from the games not having a budget for holograms, acid fog, and the like. As such, there’s not a lot for the filmmakers to hide behind.

Here, it’s just kids murdering each other in close-quarters combat in a crumbling, bombed-out arena, and few R-rated horror films released in 2023 are as vicious as this one is. Tributes are frequently impaled. Poisonings are rampant. We witness a prolonged running arc of a tribute dying of rabies. Rebels are, ostensibly, crucified and mercy-killed. A particularly bloodthirsty tribute named Coral (Mackenzie Lansing) emerges as a terrifying, tooth-gnashing slasher villain. What passes for comedy relief is Jason Schwartzman’s zealous performance as Lucky Flickerman, an amoral cartoon who delivers pitch-black jokes and announces the action in between close-up magic demonstrations and the weather report.

In the middle of it all is Zegler, our “final girl” of sorts, and she plays that traditional horror movie trope to a T. But Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes actually doesn’t stop when the games have a winner. The third act is where the film is at its most blatantly novelistic—and, yes, at two hours and 45 minutes, just a wee bit longer than it should’ve been. This is also the stretch where The Hunger Games as a series sheds its YA skin entirely. Here, it becomes a straight-up paranoid military spy drama set in Appalachia, with Snow’s last remaining vestiges of boyhood being deliberately ripped off—no different than those stitches he ripped out to see Gaul. Blyth’s gaze grows cold, betrayals start to mount, and every body that drops is a grim surprise.

The glue holding it all together is the same that gave the earlier Hunger Games films an edge over its YA brethren: the steadfast portrayal of the cynicism and emotional neglect required to regard other human beings as numbers and meat that have to be placated to be useful. There’s no artifice behind Snow’s final metamorphosis into the man we know he becomes, and there shouldn’t be. Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes humanizes Coriolanus Snow for the sole purpose of emphasizing that a man, not some unknowable monster, was responsible for all of this.