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Beautiful and gruesome in equal measure, Andrea Arnold’s first foray into magical realism is deftly realized.

A review by Panagiota Stoltidou

In Bird, her first fiction feature in almost ten years, Andrea Arnold launches us back into that universal teen phase when adults are the most implausible creatures on earth. 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) — wild, unhappy, and proudly misanthropic — struggles with the recklessness of her parents’ behavior. Her scooter-riding young father (Barry Keoghan), nicknamed Bug for all the elaborate insect tattoos splattered over his ever-shirtless torso, has just invited his new girlfriend (Frankie Box) into the tiny squat he shares with Bailey and her half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda), without consulting either of his children. His ex (Jasmine Jobson) lives across town with Bailey’s three youngest siblings and an abusive new boyfriend who treats his partner’s kids like servants.

The movie opens onto the final straw in this series of unpredictable parental choices derailing Bailey’s teenage existence. Bug, in over-the-moon fashion, announces that he is to immediately marry with the money he plans to make off an illegally purchased drug toad from Colorado. As if that weren’t enough, Bailey is required to take on bridesmaid duties for the wedding, chief among which will be to wear the horrendous dress that her stepmother made her for the occasion. The scene could have assumed a heavy tone but ends up being relatable, even comic: after a semi-quarrel with Bug where Bailey manoeuvres her way out of wearing the dress several times, she runs over to Hunter to deliver the news of their new flatmate and mom, alerting him to the possibility that their domestic life might now involve a lot of Taylor Swift. Shortly after, Bailey shaves off her head in protest and runs away across town, taking refuge and then falling asleep in a nearby field. In their tight chronological proximity, the domestic scene and the episode of Bailey’s rebellious flight perform a tonal shift that becomes exemplary for Arnold’s layered treatment of frustrated adolescence.

When Bailey wakes up the next morning — memorably, to a thread of angry Instagram texts from Bug — the quiet expanse is punctured by one eccentric, rapidly approaching detail: a kilt-wearing, sandals-doning man around Bug’s age, who goes by the name Bird and is eager to chat. German actor Franz Rogowski, with his crooked nose, sharp chin, and questioning hazel eyes, is excellently cast as the film’s titular figure.

Bailey is apprehensive of the wandering stranger with the funny accent and points her phone camera at him, in an effort to discourage him from pulling any dirty tricks on her. Yet Bird is rather flattered by Bailey’s gesture and, in one of the film’s most surprising and endearing scenes, does a little dance for the camera, the kilt tracing his graceful movements. The two proceed to strike up an unusual friendship, as intense as it is short-lived, from which Bailey walks out fundamentally changed. Despite the male actors’ physical resemblance, Arnold smartly resists turning Bird into a substitute for Bug. For all his flaws, Bug remains a deeply caring father, while Bird is less of a father figure and more of a friend, sharing Bailey’s marginalized position and love for animals. Perhaps quite predictably, he also becomes the supernatural vessel that ruptures the film’s social realist fabric.

Before its Swiss premiere at the 20th Zurich Film Festival this past October, Arnold framed Bird as the last artistic endeavor into her childhood: both an opportunity to work out her complex relationship with an absent father as well as a love letter to the unique life and characters in and around the Kent council estate where she grew up. For its working-class inflection, the film is classic Arnold, but it’s also reminiscent of other recent studies of the father-daughter dynamic, like Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun (2022) and Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper (2023).

Bird does not wholly escape coming-of-age cliché, as in the sequence where Bailey, all tucked up in her sleeping bag, dozes off to a homemade, close-up take of a butterfly only to rise out of her cocoon the next morning with her first-ever period, feeling in turns agitated and pretty. Yet the film is also gloriously funny. In one hilarious episode, Bug gathers a group of friends in his makeshift living room for a karaoke performance of Coldplay’s “Yellow,” convinced that his new frog only sweats hallucinogens to ballads. The scene also boasts a cameo by the guitarist of Fontaines D.C., whose songs make up a good portion of Bird’s restless soundtrack. The confident score, as well as the film’s many moments of raw visual poetry and the brilliant performances by Adams, Keoghan and Rogowski, come together to amp up the energy of Arnold’s take on a shifting, misfit existence within the confines of both biological and chosen families. Bird is a loud, triumphant tribute to the pleasures and perils of growing up.