Starring Nykiya Adam, Barry Keoghan, Frank Rogowski

Written & Directed by Andrea Arnold

BBC/BFI/Mubi – Still in a few cinemas now

Twelve-year-old Bailey is struggling to make sense of a life of social deprivation, neglect and violence until salvation comes in the form of a mysterious stranger.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t going to bother with Bird. I’d seen the trailer (and some of director Andrea Arnold’s other movies) and, given the depressing state of the world, I wasn’t sure I could handle two hours of unremitting gritty urban poverty, especially if it was going to be rendered via the medium of jiggly-wiggly hand held camerawork – certainly not without a stiff dose of motion sickness tablets.

I’m profoundly glad that I did.

I enjoyed Arnold’s first two features, Red Road and Fish Tank, but had fallen out of love with her, struggling to stay awake during her painfully verité interpretation of Wuthering Heights as a sweary teen misery-a-thon. Luckily, I was encouraged by a friend’s enthusiasm for Bird to give it a go, and to my great surprise this extraordinary return to form sees Arnold moving not just into magical realism but into a truly magical fusion of cinematic genres.

Shot in the scrubland and council estates of her native Kent where Arnold grew up, the child of separated teenage parents, Bird’s conviction as a movie appears to stem from strongly autobiographical roots. Twelve-year-old Bailey (compellingly evoked by newcomer Nykiya Adams) wanders the fields and grubby estuaries, left to find her own way through a turbulent adolescent coming of age. Her parents are little more than children themselves. Her Dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan knocking it out of the park yet again), the millipede tattoos covering his body seeming to crawl onto his face ready to consume him, has decided on a whim to marry his latest girlfriend, while Bailey’s mum is trapped in an abusive relationship that threatens the safety of her three half siblings, and their pet dog, Dave.

Indeed, the first half an hour of the film is unremitting. To be honest, I nearly gave up. I’d had to move to the back of the cinema to cope with Arnold’s signature jiggly-wiggly camerawork. Nor is social deprivation and child neglect my idea of a fun two hours in a cinema, but then Bailey meets the eponymous Bird (Frank Rogowski). He seems to come from nowhere, out of the dawn, on a puff of wind, wandering through the scrub in a shabby skirt.

For all we know, he could be a child abuser (it is an Andrea Arnold movie, after all) but he isn’t. He’s a lost soul in search of his family who used to live in a tower block around the corner from Bailey’s fly-infested squat. Bailey is intrigued by the mysterious stranger, his hooked nose and piercing, beady eyes reminding her of the birds she loves to film on her phone, and she sets about helping him on his quest to track down his parents.

Whether or not Bird is quite what he seems is for you to discover, when, on my strict orders, you seek out a screen to watch this film, but Andrea Arnold pulls off a remarkable trick, grabbing us by the scruff of the neck to rub our faces in the grittiest of gritty realities before taking us to somewhere entirely, and unambiguously magical.

But, fascinatingly for fellow cineastes, not only is Arnold playing inventively with conflicting genres, but Bird engages us by deconstructing its own cinematic form (yes, I know this is turning into the most pretentious review I’ve ever written, but stay with me). Bailey is entranced by the moving image, filming everything on her phone – sometimes as a weapon of self defence – before watching the footage again and again projected onto the tatty anaglypta above the bare mattress and sleeping bag that constitutes her so-called bedroom. It’s as if what she films can create a better world for herself, turning crumbling plaster into open sky. It’s her means of escape.

At the same time, Arnold constantly reminds us that what we are watching is a film. If there’s hair in the gate, she leaves it there. Every now and again, the sprocket holes flash into view, or the bottom of the frame becomes fogged. There’s no way of forgetting that even the grittiest rendition of social deprivation is a construct. We are voyeurs, watching from the comfort of a reclining cinema seat, probably in an arthouse too, one that might not even sell popcorn.

It’s an extraordinary trick, because when the magic finally kicks in, it’s counterintuitively even more persuasive and enthralling. We have to choose to believe in it.

Verdict: Bird is an extraordinary and highly original piece of work. I can imagine many losing patience with it – I nearly did – but it’s a movie that rewards our persistence, and despite its ‘poverty porn’ patina, is ultimately an uplifting celebration of the human imagination. Oh yes, and Barry Keoghan slips in a laugh-out-loud Saltburn gag along the way. It was worth seeing just for that. 10/10

Martin Jameson

http://www.ninjamarmoset.com