Bird: Film Review
Andrea Arnold‘s Bird seemed to divide opinion during LFF so I was excited to see where I landed with her latest feature.
The film stars newcomer Nykiya Adams as 12-year-old Bailey, who lives in a squat with her young dad Bug (Barry Keoghan) and her half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda) in Gravesend in North Kent. She is thrown for a loop when she discovers that his girlfriend of three months, Kayleigh (Frankie Box), is moving in with her baby daughter – and they’re getting married the next week. To cope with all the chaos inside her home, Bailey tries to find attention and adventure elsewhere and befriends a mysterious fellow named Bird (Franz Rogowski).
First of all, I cannot praise Adams enough. She leads this film with a natural ease and feels effortlessly authentic. Bailey isn’t your average 12-year-old either – she is self-assured, strong and confrontational. She clearly had to become an adult way before her time and assume the parental role with her mum and dad because they were not capable of looking after themselves, let alone her.
Keoghan is also perfectly cast as the heavily tattooed Bug. You can tell that he loves Bailey and Hunter but he doesn’t know how to be a traditional parent or responsible adult because he became a father at 14. Keoghan is very convincing as the young dad and he has plenty of memorable scenes that revolve around singing songs like Coldplay’s Yellow, Lucky Man by Richard Ashcroft and The Universal by Blur.
There isn’t a huge amount of plot – this is a slice-of-life coming-of-age film that follows Bailey as she transitions from a child into an adolescent. On the surface, her friendship with Bird can seem very odd – he is a grown man after all – but they are both lonely people who need each other. It is slow at times and I understand the poverty porn criticism (some of these living situations are shocking) but Arnold balances out the gritty environments with magic realism to offer us a sense of hope and a satisfying conclusion.
Bird is very similar to Arnold’s previous films and it won’t be for everybody, however, it is worth a watch for Adams and Keoghan’s performances. Plus all the scenes involving a toad!
In cinemas from Friday 8th November