What would happen if you crashed the most grounded, miserablist movie genre into the most flyaway and fantastical? Grim into Grimm. Bird is the answer, Andrea Arnold’s sixth film in 18 years. Again the great performances, again the ability to secure a name who you’d expect would be doing bigger things. Again Arnold makes us work for a redemptive moment, a shred of hope and humanity. Look at those closing credits though, Arnold’s cast dancing to Fontaines DC’s Too Real. Pure joy. Arnold is like a cat playing with a mouse.
The big name is Barry Keoghan, Oscar-nominated for Saltburn, who dropped out of Gladiator II to do this. Playing skanky drug-dealing Bug, he’s a low-life always abuzz on something, but not the star of this show. That’s Nykiya Adams, who plays daughter Bailey, a young woman deeply unhappy that dad is about to marry Kayleigh (Frankie Box), a local hairdresser.
Their house is a mess and dirty, they live in a hopeless, crime-ridden part of Broken Britain where all the youth speak grime – “fam”, “blud”, “bruv”. This is the 1960s British kitchen sinker revived again by Arnold, who’s been doing this sort of thing since Red Road first announced her as a talent.
The big picture is bleak and in case we haven’t got it, Arnold gives us cutaways to creatures struggling to survive, dirty things, broken items stored in jam jars. Shooting on the miserablist’s film stock of choice, grainy 16mm, Arnold layers on the yuk of Bailey’s daily life, living without guidance or any real parental steer in a world beyond hope among the feckless poor, where law and order is maintained by gangs of feral youth. Bailey’s half-brother, Hunter (Jason Buda), is in one such gang, administering rough justice to people classed as paedos, or thieves or whatever.
You get the idea. Fun it isn’t. And yet there is something else afoot here. From the first shot Arnold is suggesting a parallel, more magical world. A bird soars on the wind, a butterfly shimmers, translucent against the light, sometimes even the graffiti seems to have a little sparkle. A fairy tale world perhaps – isn’t Kayleigh the wicked stepmother? That toad Bug wants to harvest hallucinogenic venom from (a new one on me) – is that a fairytale frog?
And then Bird (Franz Rogowski) arrives in the story, a guy with a foreign accent dressed in a skirt, halfway between a prince and a princess, a mysterious creature who takes to Bailey instantly – and she to him.
To Bailey, Bird suggests other worlds exist, other modes of being. Bird might be a fantasy but it turns out he’s a very human human – a kid who used to live in this neck of the woods and is now back searching for his birth father.
Together the two of them go on a quest – the prince and the pauper – Arnold rubbing our faces in even more vileness in the shape of Skate, the rancid, foul-mouthed new man in Bailey’s birth mother’s life. If this is a grim fairy tale, Skate is its wicked stepmother, the sort whose feet need easing into red-hot cast iron shoes. Instead, concerned about Skate’s proximity to her two younger sisters, who still live with mother Peyton (Jasmine Jobson), Bailey decides that something needs to be done about him, and so she sets to work.
There are no bad performances here. What’s interesting, given his starriness, is how little Keoghan is in it. Instead it’s the superb Adams and Rogowski carrying the bulk of the weight, though James Nelson-Joyce is excruciatingly horrible as Skate, a nasty piece of work who deserves whatever’s coming his way and it can’t come quick enough.
Along the way Jason Williamson of the Sleaford Mods – satirical chroniclers of Broken Britain’s fuck-you culture – turns up in an entirely appropriate extended cameo. And Nicolas Demetr, as cadet gangster Ghost, is soaraway excellent in a tiny role that barely gets a screen credit.
There is so much good stuff, like the way Arnold skips between the genres – slice of life, coming of age, kids adventure, fairy tale – and butts magical realism up against the most miserable miserablism. The soundtrack, by Burial, doomy as hell, is also just right.
“Is this too real for ya?” goes a line in the DC Fontaines song. Yes, probably. But Arnold tantalises and teases too. Will she give us an escapist finale? Could she make a film that did?
Bird – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
