Macho tempers, teenage dreams and a dash of magic all coalesce in Bird, the latest by British director Andrea Arnold. When she’s firing on all cylinders, Arnold – who announced her talent to the wider world in 2009 with the release of her uncomfortable, sinuously sexy coming-of-age breakout film Fish Tank – is hard to beat. Her aesthetic and thematic approach is inspired as much by the kitchen sink realism of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach as it is by her own personal, subjective lens. Here both are combined wonderfully, with touches of magical realism that give this film the quality of a working-class fairy tale.
After dabbling in road movies such as American Honey (2016) and an adaptation of Wuthering Heights (2011), with Bird Arnold returns to the Fish Tank template: a council-estate setting and a young girl’s struggles with a single parent. She also casts in major roles two of the most striking actors of recent years – Saltburn‘s Barry Keoghan and Passages‘ Franz Rogowski. These two – with their lupine features and history of wise, offbeat roles – counterbalance one another beautifully onscreen, crackling with lively, scrappy energy.
Standing between them, though, is the real protagonist: 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams, a wonderful, gentle young screen presence with just enough pre-teen angst, who holds her own perfectly well opposite these two men). Keoghan is her loving but volatile single father, Bug, a tattooed conspiracy theorist with numerous children scattered around. The father and daughter have a knife’s edge relationship, one of both fear and affection; you can sense the watchful wariness in Bailey whenever Bug is displeased. Meanwhile, Bailey’s drug-addicted mother is shacked up with a bullying Liverpudlian, while her father’s impending, impulsive marriage to his girlfriend does not fill her with joy.
One day, in a fit of pique after an argument, Bailey runs away from her cramped council estate home and into a seemingly itinerant, delicate man in his thirties, Bird (Rogowski), who says he went missing as a child and is looking for his parents – and just so happens to claim he can sprout wings.
The enigmatic stranger is curiously appealing to Bailey, and an oddball friendship forms – one that’s bound to be misunderstood by those around them. But rather than lean into the darkest and most cynical expectations, Arnold finds peculiar freedom and joy in the unravelling of Bird’s mystery. She continues to have the same unsparing eye for predatory behavior and cycles of poverty, but she is also able to find a fantastical and optimistic angle in spite of these threats. Instead of leading Bailey down a primrose path, Bird turns out to be happy to return her kindness when she helps him to find his birth mother. In exchange, Bird extends the girl a little winged favour of his own, leading to an affirming – and surprisingly buoyant – conclusion to an otherwise grim story.
