Bird (15)

Twelve-year-old Bailey lives in a squat in Gravesend with her single father Bug and wayward older brother Hunter. As she approaches puberty, Bailey is hungry for attention and affection, both of which are sorely lacking at home. A mysterious stranger called Bird, on a journey of his own, gate-crashes Bailey's world and encourages her to seek freedom from oppressive and unhealthy environments.

LondonNet Film Review

Bird (15) Film Review from LondonNet

Oscar-winning writer-director Andrea Arnold beautifully captured the awkwardness of adolescence in her second film, Fish Tank, kindling sparks of sexual attraction between a 15-year-old girl living on a rundown housing estate and her mother’s adult boyfriend, played by Michael Fassbender. Tour-de-force performances, especially from newcomer Katie Jarvis, and an emotionally wrought script demonstrated Arnold’s rare ability to cut to the bone with words and shoot in a naturalistic style reminiscent of an intimate fly-on-the-wall documentary…

The Dartford-born filmmaker attempts (and fails) to conduct lightning twice by returning to her native Kent for a gritty coming-of-age drama set in a squat in Gravesend where young lives in motion are visibly fractured like the graffiti-strewn, insecure space they call home. Newcomer Nykiya Adams is mesmerising as a 12-year-old traversing the rubicon from adolescence to womanhood, molten with tightly coiled rage and confusion at a world that saddles her biological mother (Jasmine Jobson) with an abusive partner (James Nelson-Joyce) and inflicts trauma on three younger siblings.

Arnold alternates between her own piercing lens and the cracked mobile phone that her young heroine uses to document beauty and heartache. Humour is fleeting but does stretch to a joke at the expense of co-star Barry Keoghan’s eye-catching naked gyrations in Saltburn to Murder On The Dancefloor by Sophie Ellis-Bextor and earned him a Best Leading Actor nomination at the 2024 Baftas. Arnold’s picture is more of a slow, melancholic sway.

Bailey lives with her 14-year-old brother Hunter (Jason Buda) and wayward single father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), whose get-rich-quick scheme to pay for a hastily arranged wedding to girlfriend Kayleigh (Frankie Box) involves a Colorado river toad with hallucinogenic properties that “slimes to sincere music”. Cue an on-screen singalong to Yellow by Coldplay.

The girl is hungry for attention and affection and she sifts dreamily in her room with views from her window of the Gravesend to Tilbury ferry taking people away from her harsh reality. On her way home one afternoon from shadowing her brother, Bailey encounters a mysterious stranger in a kilt named Bird (Franz Rogowski), also on a journey of self-discovery and healing. He allows Arnold’s picture to take flight and crash-land with an ambitious conflation of social and magical realism that audiences may find challenging.

Bird bears the hallmarks of Arnold’s work, conjuring a contemporary fable of resilience to a soundtrack that careens from Blur and The Verve to Rednex’s line-dancing anthem Cotton Eye Joe. While Adams dazzles in every scene and Keoghan embraces the chaotic energy of his hand-to-mouth father, German actor Rogowski remains enigmatic until the bittersweet end.

– Sarah Lee