REVIEW: Bird [2024]

Rating: R | Runtime: 119 minutes
Release Date: November 8th, 2024 (UK/USA)
Studio: MUBI
Director(s): Andrea Arnold
Writer(s): Andrea Arnold

Mum says I was born looking for trouble.

Bailey (Nykiya Adams) is kind of raising herself. Her father (Barry Keoghan’s Bug) was fourteen when her half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda) was born and not much older for her. The trio squat in northern Kent and pretty much go about their business separately unless someone needs something from the other. And since the kids had to learn not to count on dad to provide what they need (namely attention), they aren’t too keen on giving their own away so easily. So, of course Bailey rejects the assumption she’ll drop everything to be a bridesmaid at his wedding that he literally just told her about. It’s a little about rebellion and a little about respect, but also the fear that marriage might mean she’ll get even less of him than before.

Needing an escape, Bailey decides to follow Hunter and his criminal friends as they run around town doling out an ill-conceived brand of vigilante justice. It’s on her confused journey back that she meets a stranger blown in on a weirdly rhythmic wind named Bird (Franz Rogowski). She’s obviously hesitant talking to him considering men have never had a trusting presence in her life, but she begins to at least believe his purpose: finding his long-lost family. Why that quest seems to take her back to her own (Bailey’s mother used to be a neighbor of his) doesn’t quite compute as more than a coincidence at first, but their interactions (and interactions she believes she’s making with him even whem he’s not there) soon turn fantastical. To the point where she must question if he’s even real.

Andrea Arnold might use this character’s search as the propulsive force moving Bird from start to finish, but the result ultimately opens Bailey’s eyes to her own life’s trajectory and the sometimes unfair sense of relativity marking it. Because while Bug is hardly a shining example of good or reliable parenting, he accepts the job to his best abilities. The same can’t be said about Bird’s father who left his mother. Nor about the man to whom Bailey’s mother (Jasmine Jobson’s Peyton) is currently attached—an abusive opportunist named Skate (James Nelson-Joyce) who domineers and controls a household that also contains Bailey’s three younger half-siblings. This realization isn’t about absolving Bug, but presenting Bailey the chance to accept his love for what it is rather than what it should be.

I say “chance” because she doesn’t have to accept it. Bailey’s journey is one about fact-finding and context at a moment in her life (puberty) where it seems there’s no safety net. She doesn’t want to be a kid anymore, so she tries to be a gangster lying about her virginity and her stomach for violence. She doesn’t quite want to be an adult either, though, because she sees the struggle her mom faces every day next to a volatile figure constantly threatening to kill her. All Bailey knows for certain—and one could argue it stems from Bug’s own penchant for rising to the occasion when someone he loves is in trouble—is that she must protect her siblings at all costs. And, to some extent, that includes the child-like Bird. She wants to give them and him the promise of a life she didn’t have herself.

The magical realism that Arnold injects into the story isn’t as easy to parse as you might expect in these types of films. For two-thirds of the runtime she very intentionally ignores the idea her story possesses magical realism at all by constantly having Bailey’s attempts to prove its existence fail. But then the last third arrives with a wealth of impossibilities that simply cannot be explained as anything else. The question then is whether you believe Bird is the cause of it all or if Bailey is conflating what she needs him to be with who he actually is. Kind of like the exact opposite of what she does with Bug. Maybe Bird never returns after his first goodbye and Bailey’s mind imagines the rest. Or maybe all those coincidences really do reveal his appearance was always as her guardian angel.

I love that ambiguity. Not because of how it relates to the action, but because of how it teaches Bailey that she has a say in how she experiences her life. Bird becomes a catalyst for maturity. A prism with which to look back at moments she once saw colored as tragic disappointment that now seem like examples of optimism for the future. Adams impressively shoulders that pivot with an authentic performance that both adheres to her character’s physical age and an emotional intelligence reaching well beyond it. Rogowski is fantastic as the quasi chaperone and chaperoned—just as scared and hurt as Bailey yet also as strong when needed. And Keoghan rounds things out with a hard exterior yet empathetic soul. Because maybe things would be easier without his kids, but he’s never once regretted having them.