It’s been nearly a decade since the Kent-born writer-director Andrea Arnold last made a feature film, said Dave Calhoun in Time Out: after 2016’s “American Honey”, she dived into a load of TV directing work in the US and, in 2021, she made the “arresting, experimental” documentary “Cow”. Now, for “Bird”, she has returned to the “suburban edgelands of Kent” that were the setting of her breakout film “Fish Tank”.
Nykiya Adams plays 12-year-old Bailey, who lives in a squat with her chaotic, “tattooed-to-the-eyeballs” dad (Barry Keoghan). Early one morning, she meets Bird (played by the German actor Franz Rogowski), a “spirit-like, compassionate outsider” who spends his time perching on buildings, and who gradually reveals to Bailey that he has mysterious magical powers. Swerving between “upsetting, dark realism and something much more magical, even quasi-biblical”, the film skilfully balances “a fearless focus on life’s tough realities with a hefty dollop of teary sentiment”.
“The best that you can hope from any filmmaker is creative ambition and the capacity to take big swings with their material,” said Kevin Maher in The Times. With “Bird”, Arnold has taken “her biggest swing yet”. Fans of her “gritty canon” may hate the film, “because it lives in that tricky place where social and magical realism collide”, but I found it “by turns strange, beguiling and quietly moving”.
Its setting is bleak, yet “‘Bird’ finds beauty and wonder in every frame”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. “The film celebrates rather than judges its erratic and occasionally challenging characters. It’s the closest Andrea Arnold has come to a feelgood flick.”