US Edition
Review
Bird: It’s hard to know what to make of Andrea Arnold’s bizarre Barry Keoghan drama
The English filmmaker’s latest about a girl whose imagination flies above her grotty home life makes an odd foray into magical realism
The main character in Andrea Arnold’s Bird sums up everything this feted British filmmaker knows her way around. She’s a 12-year-old kid called Bailey, pugnaciously played by the newcomer Nykiya Adams, who dabbles in video art on her phone and has an imagination which flies above her grotty home life: like Arnold herself, she’s restlessly on the lookout for transient beauty in the everyday.
Bailey lives in a Gravesend squat with her dad Bug (a heavily tattooed Barry Keoghan), a small-time drug dealer about to marry his current squeeze. This roughneck is busy extracting psychedelic venom from a new pet he calls “the drug toad” – a purchase he brings home in a carrier bag, convinced his ship has finally come in.
He starts blaring out all the music he can think of, good and bad, to encourage slime out of the poor creature, which has to sit through more play-throughs of Blur’s The Universal than ought to be allowed under the Animal Welfare Act.
Nothing about this whole arrangement is Bailey’s dream, and she gets no say in any of it, obviously. Her horizons are doubly cramped, hemmed in by fairly extreme ambient poverty – there’s rubbish piled up in every frame, graffiti on every wall – but also a lack of independence at her tender age.
When she pays a rare visit, in the film’s most intense scene, to her stressed-out mother (Jasmine Jobson), who has three younger kids to raise, she finds her in bed with a new boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) who’s such a poisonous tyrant he makes Bug look like Winnie-the-Pooh.
The only refuge Bailey finds is a curious friendship with a stranger named Bird (Frank Rogowski) – a skirt-wearing, German-accented oddball she meets in a field one day, who says he was born in a nearby council block, and has come back to locate his parents.
Rogowski, Europe’s art-cinema darling of the moment, is an intentional foreign body in Arnold’s working-class setting, even if the prancing, otherworldly mannerisms of his character are such that Bailey’s young thug of a half-brother (Jason Buda) would probably knife him on sight. It’s lucky all round, though somewhat implausible, that no one’s really paying attention.
It’s hard to know what to make of Bird, and indeed, Bird, which could be described as Arnold with a twist. The boldest development comes too late to be divulged, but concerns the stranger’s function as a guardian angel to Bailey – almost a superhero, like Eric Draven in The Crow. It’s likely to be divisive, and I’m not convinced it works.
Everything Arnold always does well is palpable – her trusty photographer Robbie Ryan doesn’t miss; Adams is excellent; the sense of place is as pungent as ever. If you want Keoghan serving karaoke and shirtless dancing again after Saltburn, you won’t be disappointed, though it couldn’t be called the freshest use of him. Personally, I couldn’t follow Arnold over the dotted line into violent magical realism, however situated it might be in a young girl’s sense of fantasy. It’s a miscalculation, like playing your weakest suit mistaking it for a trump.
Cert TBC, screening at Cannes Film Festival. UK release date TBC