Children forced to grow up too fast understand the pained nature of powerlessness like few others. This is true of the pre-teen at the center of director Andre Arnold’s “Bird,” Bailey (Nykiya Adams). Born and bred in the small town of Gravesend, just 20 miles from the hustle and bustle of London, the 12-year-old lives in a heavily graffitied council block alongside her far too young father, tatted hopeful druglord Bug (Barry Keoghan) and older brother, Hunter (Jason Buda).
By the time we meet her, she has just learned the shocking news that her father is getting married to his girlfriend of three months, and she is moving into their dilapidated flat alongside her daughter, a little girl cute as a button with permanently reddened cheeks. Bug sees this as the start of his new family, and Bailey sees it as the end of hers. This sudden change does very little to Bailey’s bubbling teenage angst, and she processes it the way angry teenagers do best: by joining a gang of peacocky lanky boys and aimlessly roaming the streets she’s known her whole life, capturing her reality through her beaten smartphone.
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The vertical videos the teen records are projected on the wall of her makeshift bedroom, Bailey lying on her bed, watching her life go by once, twice again. The moments, at first seemingly ordinary, grow increasingly poignant as Arnold begins unspooling the wider reality of Bailey’s life. Her mother gave her up as a baby, and her father, then a 16-year-old with a toddler from a previous relationship, took her in. Bug might have the outer shell of a thug, tattooed from top to bottom and always after the next miraculous money-making scheme, but there is no doubt she loves her. In his way, at least.
Still, Bailey doesn’t feel loved. She is suspicious of kindness and oblivious to the fact there are people in the world who get to live with survival mode turned off. When she first meets Bird (Franz Rogowski), a raggedy man wearing a skirt and dancing through a field at sunrise, she tells him to back off. He does, but she doesn’t.
Bird is everything Bailey is not. Unguarded, aloof, unrepentantly himself. He’s in Gravesend looking for his long-lost family and Bailey, far too used to sorting other people’s problems, can’t stop herself from stepping in. Arnold is sparse with information on Bird, digging deeper into Bailey’s reality instead. Her mother lives a few miles away in a house filled with clutter and revolving drug users who care little about disturbing the routine of the three small children who call the place home. Bailey wishes she could whisk her siblings away, the impotence eating away at her childhood.
Arnold, who was last at Cannes in 2021 with “Cow,” a documentary about the life of a dairy cow, once again observes the rhythms of nature with her return to fiction. There is the titular Bird and Bug, the loving thug, of course, but there are also the flying creatures that seem to guard Bailey from afar. The print of a bird on her wall is always on the backdrop of her videos, reminding the teen that sometimes it is important to look at things from afar—to step back. There are also toads and dogs and fish, and reminders of the animal nature of humans, too. Blood stains sheets and clothes alike, ushering a girl into womanhood and a deeper understanding of the value of female camaraderie.
“Bird” beautifully threads the line between the real and the surreal. Much like her previous films, Arnold paints a tangible sense of time and place, walking the viewer through decrepit alleyways and rusty bridges to the sound of Coldplay and The Verve, the buzzing noise of electrical trimmers juxtaposed to the mechanical clicking of phone keyboards. Within this harsh reality, Bird comes in as a door, an escape. He holds guard perched atop Bailey’s neighboring building, standing still as she stares at him through her window. He doesn’t have a phone but is there whenever she needs him. Others can see him, but he is akin to a spiritual entity, put on this world to walk alongside Bailey as she navigates a rough coming of age.
There is so much beauty in “Bird,” both within the relationships unraveling onscreen and on the screen itself — bright reds and whites and blacks lusciously captured in the film, the edges of the image burnt and remade, almost like yet another bird, the phoenix. Rogowski’s presence is scarce, but looking back at “Bird,” it is as if he is deeply embedded in every shot, the memory of him ever-looming. The German actor is so rare in the encompassing of raw, moving gentleness. In Bird’s soulful eyes lay not pity but empathy, a love of others so freely given to those who need it most. It is so very moving to witness it.
Much like Katie Jarvis in “Fish Tank” and Sasha Lane in “American Honey,” Arnold extracts another career-making performance out of her young protagonist with Adams. The newcomer encompasses the emotional shifts in this one very formative week in Bailey’s life with such grace, effectively communicating both the boisterousness of rebellion and the fragility of insecurity. She more than holds her ground against a Rogowski in brilliant form, and their first meeting, nested within the safety of high grass as the sun slowly pulls the cover of darkness from the buildings nearby, is sure to be one of the most beautiful scenes in cinema this year. [A-]
