Review: Andrea Arnold’s Bird is a strange but affable fairy tale | Canada Voices

• Bird
• Written and directed by Andrea Arnold
• Starring Nykiya Adams, Barry Keoghan, Franz Rogowski
• Classification R; 119 minutes

Coming off of her 2021 documentary Cow, about the rhythms and regimens of a dairy cow in Kent, English filmmaker Andrea Arnold returns with Bird (2024), a strange but affable fairy tale about coming of age under precarious circumstances. The monosyllabic title suggests another creature feature, but instead follows Bailey (Nykiya Adams), a moody 12-year-old girl living in Gravesend with her devoted but coked-up father Bug (Barry Keoghan), a sobriquet nodding to the centipede tattoo creeping up his jaw.

After scootering around the Thameside town to Fontaines D.C.’s Too Real (a needle-drop that opens and closes the film), Bug reveals that he is getting married to his girlfriend of two months, and that she and her toddler are moving into the graffiti-tagged squat where they live. Bailey is mortified by the whole ordeal, even before she is presented with the purple, sequined, cheetah-print unitard she is expected to wear to the ceremony. It is clear that her father cannot afford more dependants, though he assures her of his plan for quick cash: a Coloradan toad whose slime has hallucinogenic properties. In frustration, she shaves her head and follows her older brother Hunter (Jason Buda) and his scrawny gang around the streets until they shoo her away.

After sleeping in a field, Bailey wakes to the silhouette of a cheery, kilted stranger in front of her. Anticipating danger, she whips out her phone and begins recording the man, who twirls for the camera and introduces himself. His name is Bird (Franz Rogowski) and he is trying to find his family, though he has no belongings or idea where he is. Bailey bolts from the scene but finds herself revisiting the footage of the pirouetting stranger with fascination; when they meet again on the street, Bailey offers to help him find his parents. Bailey and Bird’s ensuing friendship feels like a play on Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), wherein a working-class English boy detaches from his dysfunctional surroundings to care for a pet kestrel.

Bird can also be regarded as a spiritual sequel to Arnold’s 2009 film Fish Tank, which starred Katie Jarvis as a volatile teenager living in Essex who falls for her mother’s boyfriend (an exceedingly charming Michael Fassbender). Both films follow fledgling adolescent girls traipsing around scant flats with a combined boredom and burden of responsibility. For Bailey, this is a twofold duty of locating Bird’s parents and protecting her young siblings, who stay with her mother and a cruel live-in boyfriend – neither endeavour befitting of an unsupervised pre-teen.

Interestingly, Bird circumvents the usual critiques against Arnold’s brand of social realism; chiefly, that her narratives are sprung from deprivation and thus risk exploiting or aestheticizing struggle. Compared to her earlier work, Bird has softer edges and a far neater social regard: Bug and his friends are framed as goofy rather than menacing; Hunter’s gang exclusively targets abusers; much of the film’s graffiti spouts positive affirmations; and the older man who materializes at the young girl’s time of need is so innocuous that he evaporates. Even “Too Real” boasts a kind of intention about the film’s authenticity in its unremitting chorus: “Is it too real for ya?”

But after all of the film’s considered “naturalism” – lots of exposition and little room to catch its breath – Bird takes a dip into magical realism with an avian mutation reminiscent of Black Swan. It’s a gutsy insertion in an otherwise unrelieved social drama, but one that eclipses Bailey’s own metamorphosis: the chaotic events of the film (Bug’s wedding, Bird’s arrival, the drug toad, and the mother’s violent boyfriend) crucially materialize around the time that Bailey gets her first period. This disorder matches the adolescent peaks and troughs of puberty, selfhood, and insecurity, but Bailey’s shifting emotions are constantly externalized through the character of Bird. Adams delivers a great performance that is at times blunted by Rogowski’s typically peculiar and captivating comportment and Keoghan’s haywire antics.

Throughout the film, Bailey accumulates cellphone footage of threats and tormentors, nature, birds, and passersby, which she projects onto her bedroom wall at night. These images are a kind of personal cinema that gives shape to Bailey’s experiences and allows her to bring the outside world into her bedroom at will. The hasty, mobile interludes ironically become the more sincere bits as they place the narrative action in Bailey’s hands – the sort of authenticity Arnold seems to aspire to. Perhaps Bird is best understood as a film about self-consciousness or perhaps it is just a self-conscious film, ironing out the flaws of these well-meaning characters to create a fairy tale or apologue.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)