Bird, 2024.
Directed by Andrea Arnold
Starring Barry Keoghan, Franz Rogowski, Nykiya Adams, James Nelson-Joyce, and Jason Buda.
SYNOPSIS:
Bailey lives with her brother Hunter and her father Bug, who raises them alone in a squat in northern Kent. Bug doesn’t have much time to devote to them. Bailey looks for attention and adventure elsewhere.
We’re on familiar territory when it comes to a world viewed through the prism of American Honey and Cow-director Andrea Arnold. There’s the achingly real depiction of kitchen sink England, interspersed with lingering shots of flies stuck in webs, or bees resting on flowers. Oh, and lots for the ornithologists in the audience to dig their talons into, although the titular Bird might surprise a few.
Played by Franz Rogowski, who was outstanding in 2023’s Passages, Bird isn’t the central character for Arnold’s fantasy-flecked fable, but he’s certainly the pivotal one when it comes to the film taking flight or not. More on that later.
This is the coming-of-age story of Bailey (Nykiya Adams), a 12-year old girl imprisoned in her high rise home, misunderstood by her well meaning drug-dealer father (Barry Keoghan), who has a get-rich-quick scheme on the go that involves hallucinogenic slime farmed from the back of an imported toad, that’ll only secrete if people sing Coldplay songs to it. That sentence alone should tell you we’re walking a fine tonal line when it comes to Bird.
That plot thread in particular feels a little bit silly and out of sync with the darker recesses that the film peers into. It even includes a rather jarring Saltburn in-joke as Keoghan and his cohorts discuss how much they like Sophia Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor. It’s too indulgent to the admittedly fun character that Keoghan is playing, but is jarring when sat alongside a story that involves abuse and abandonment. Perhaps it’s because this is viewed through the eyes of Bailey that the film is chaotic in structure, but it doesn’t quite work.
That child-like viewpoint might also explain the way that her friendship unfolds with Bird, who appears as if carried on the wind, like a Mr. Tumnus-style character, flitting in and out of her life as if a wayward spirit. It turns the story into The Girl and the Heron, as his appearance and assistance begins to become more fantastical, it juxtaposes with the increasing severity of Bailey’s situation. It’s reminiscent, although a much more subtle way of telling childhood trauma tales like A Monster Calls or The Bridge to Terabithia.
They are probably misleading comparisons though, because Arnold’s film remains firmly grounded in Gravesend, and a modern one at that, with all of the colloquialisms and slang of youth Britain. It’s a bleak existence that Bailey navigates, one of fractured and blended families, teenage pregnancies, tents lining the doorways of shops long since shut down. She manages to retreat to greener areas of this concrete jungle, which is where Arnold’s predilection for meditating on the beauty of nature kicks in. Bailey often stares towards the sky at the birds, clearly longing for an escape, only for it to be shattered by the reality of something like her mother’s slap-happy new boyfriend.
Carrying these strange narrative shifts and weighty issues on her shoulders is newcomer Nykiya Adams, who dominates the film, appearing in almost every scene, totally and utterly drawing you into this world, so-much-so that despite the messy feel of it all, and the obnoxious introduction to it, by the final scene you’ll experience an emotional wallop that you perhaps weren’t expecting. Complimenting her performance is Rogowski, who delivers a turn of quiet assurance and impressive physicality as Bailey’s spirit animal/daemon/whatever he is.
Bird is a strange but surprising beast that never allows you to second-guess Arnold’s intentions. An adolescent rites-of-passage tale that bleeds minimalist fantasy with dirt under the nails drama, that’ll take flight for some, and be a Dodo for others. I’m still undecided.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★
Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter
