Bird (2024) film review - Andrea Arnold’s magical realist masterpiece
★★★★★
‘Bird’ is a captivating coming-of-age story which fuses hard-hitting social realism with a bold foray into the realm of the mystical.
Director: Andrea Arnold. Starring: Nykika Adams, Barry Keoghan, Franz Rogowski, Jason Buda. 15 cert, 119 min.
British auteur Andrea Arnold’s newest feature film Bird fuses the hard-hitting social realism she is renowned for with a bold foray into the realm of the mystical. Returning once more to the council estates of her youth, in Bird Arnold trains her camera on 12 year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams). Teetering on the edge of adolescence, Bailey’s journey into womanhood is complicated by the chaotic escapades of her single Father Bug (Barry Keoghan) and the ubiquitous violence of her surroundings. Amid this turbulence, Bailey finds an unexpected beacon of hope in Bird (Franz Rogowski), a strangely angelic wanderer searching for his lost family. Their unlikely companionship drives a story that blends kitchen-sink realism with a magical realist spiritual odyssey. Featuring terrific performances from its cast, not least from newcomer Nykika Adams, Bird strikes a masterful balance between the grit and grace that has come to define Arnold's cinematic oeuvre.
‘Bird’ (2024) film poster artwork
In recent years, British filmmaking has seen a surge in stories written by women, about women. Alongside the likes of Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir, 2019), Charlotte Wells (Aftersun, 2022), and Molly Manning Walker (How to Have Sex, 2023), Arnold has been at the forefront of this movement. Both her shorts and her feature films, including Wasp (2003) and Fish Tank (2009), centre invariably on the figure of the marginalised, working-class young woman. What is extraordinary about Arnold’s character studies is the way they refuse to shy away from the bleak, but also always make room for hope. Her heroines are not uncomplicated people, and their socioeconomic backgrounds do not doom them to unfulfilling lives. In Arnold’s films, the spectre of freedom and hope is ever present, embodied by the natural world and her protagonists’ intimate relationship to it.
Arnold affectionately captures the impoverished industrial town of Gravesend in Kent, where Bird takes place, through an ecological lens. This is a lens the director is familiar with, having grown up similarly ‘surrounded by liminal wilderness’. Handheld shots of flocks of birds in flight and close-ups of butterflies and feathers, apprehended lovingly through Bailey’s iPhone camera, suffuse the visual texture of the film with a dreamlike quality. In the grimy squat Bailey inhabits, the walls of her bedroom are adorned with childish paintings of trees and flowers. As she lies in bed at night, the camera aligns with her point of view, lingering on her bedroom window as she gazes out at the world beyond. These contemplative moments frame Bailey’s kinship with nature not necessarily as a means of escape, but as a peaceful, comforting coexistence.
This peaceful coexistence contrasts sharply with Bug’s character, whose relationship to nature is defined by commodification. Throughout Bird, he is seen coaxing a drug-toad into generating hallucinogenic slime he can sell to fund his upcoming wedding. The key is sincerity, Bug insists as he regales the impassive toad with Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’. But not ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’, I hate that song, he jokes in a sly dig at Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (2023). While nature comprises the very physical make-up of Bug, etched into his skin in the form of tattoos of centipedes and moths, it is with Bird’s character that Arnold takes the blurring of boundaries between human and non-human to new, otherworldly extremes. Like Bailey, Bird is androgynous in appearance, sporting a flowing skirt which flutters in the wind as he haunts the tops of Gravesend’s high-rise apartment buildings. Adopting an empathetic, bird’s eye view of his surroundings, Bird descends into Bailey’s life like a celestial being, personifying the beauty and companionship offered to her by nature.
Arnold’s sensitivity to how music can carry a film from moment to moment is superb. Where the sounds of Blur and Fontaines D.C. pay homage to British working class culture, Burial’s electronic soundtrack infuses Bird with a real sense of the magical, enveloping the viewer within an enchanting audiovisual experience. These fleeting moments of magic, and Bailey’s friendship with Bird, provide much needed relief from the film’s more distressing plotline. Bailey’s Mother (Jasmine Jobson), who lives apart with Bailey’s three young siblings, is in an abusive relationship with the erratic Skate (James Nelson-Joyce). In the absence of parental authority, Bailey, determined to rescue her siblings and save her Mother, enlists the help of her half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda) and his amateur vigilante group. As Bird wryly observes: ‘You’re used to sorting it, aren’t you? Taking care of things yourself’.
The film’s climax occurs when Skate breaks into the family home to attack Bailey’s Mother, Hunter’s vigilante group having failed to take action in time. Knocked to the ground and half-conscious, through bleary eyes, Bailey observes the impossible—Bird, transformed into a humanoid eagle, spreading his feathered wings to shield her from Skate’s incoming attack. Arnold’s invocation of fantasy here functions as protectively as Bailey’s iPhone camera, which she wields throughout the film in anticipation of aggression on behalf of others. Magical realism has long been a literary tool for creative socio-political critique, particularly amongst Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. There is a limit to what one can see and rationally accept. Faced with injustice and violence, fantasy can be a crucial way of processing and deconstructing what lies before us.
For me, the magical realism of Bird also reflects that within Bailey which is determined to remain a child. Full of wonder and curiosity, she is a character who still believes in the possibility of heroes and magic. In this way, Bird shares more in common with films like Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) than with those rooted strictly in the social realist tradition. At the end of the film, Bird materialises at Bug’s wedding to bid farewell before taking flight once more. As a character, Bird is effective not just as a foil to Bug, but because he retains his opacity until the end. We are never quite sure where he came from, and we get no sense of where he is going next. The film’s final slip into fantasy—the morphing of Bailey’s eyes into those of an animal—could easily have felt camp. Yet reflective as it is of Bird’s indelible impact on her life and the newfound confidence she has in her identity, Arnold pulls it off in terrific fashion, to the backdrop of Barry Keoghan crooning Blur’s ‘The Universal’ to his blushing bride.
Bird is many things—fairytale, fable, coming-of-age story, comedy, drama—but its overriding message is one of community. As Hunter says to Bailey when questioning her about Bird’s identity, ‘No one’s no one, Bailey’. In Arnold’s films, this sentiment extends beyond people. Cinematographer Robby Ryan treats the surrounding environment with the same care and attention as his human subjects. Even as he navigates the rundown suburbs of Kent, his impressionistic style captures the world in picturesque detail, with every frame saturated with vivid blues, yellows, greens, and reds. Through this expressive visual style and deeply empathetic storytelling, Arnold urges us to consider the way we are connected not just to other people, but also to the world around us. Bird surpassed all my expectations, and has overtaken Fish Tank as my favourite of her films—which is no easy task at all. Capturing the harsh realities of the everyday and transcending them through poetic imagination, Bird is wholly original, and certainly one of the best films of 2024.