Barry Keoghan & Franz Rogowski Make Magic In Andrea Arnold's 'Bird'

If there is a better scene in a 2024 movie than the one contained in Andrea Arnold’s Bird where a drunken Barry Keoghan and his blokes sing Coldplay’s “Yellow” to a toad in order to get said toad to unload its hallucinogenic saliva onto a broken sheet of car-window glass then you’re going to have to work hard to convince me of it. And that’s just one of the many weird wonders contained here in this surprisingly tender and sometimes terrifying new tale spun from the filmmaker behind American Honey and Fish Tank. Only Andrea Arnold could make a movie with dog murder this profoundly sweet.

I’m putting those trigger words up-front—I am aware there is an entire website on the internet devoted solely to telling people whether the dog lives or dies—because Bird won’t be for everybody, and that’s fine. Andrea Arnold films in general are not for everybody. She’s always been aggressive in her film-making—her movie before this one was a wordless documentary observing a cow’s life on its way to being slaughtered, for god’s sake. Her unblinking forays into toxic behavior and the squalor of poverty-stricken U.K. estate living puts as many people off as it captivates. But speaking as a person who was raised in extreme poverty myself I’ve always had a hair-trigger when it comes to “poverty porn” and Arnold has never set me off, because she never romanticizes it.

Being poor is just the way that it is for so many of her characters. And Arnold will often wield the audience’s own assumptions about these folks against us—in Bird it happens repeatedly, where the quote-unquote trashiest of behaviors hit us upfront, only for Arnold to blind-side us with warmth, generosity, and kindness underneath.

And Bird is indeed in many ways her sweetest and most joyous film—qualities she levels out with plenty of hard realities and a good share of violence, to be sure. But you don’t leave this movie feeling bleak (or to paraphrase American Honey’s stand-out tune, as if you’ve visited “a hopeless place”). This film ends on a celebratory wedding full of hugs and tears and Brit-pop singalongs! Most of its characters turn out to be really pretty good people. (Not the dog murderer of course, but he gets his.) And the magical realism that Arnold’s previously hinted at in small doses now comes fully to the fore. Why this movie is practically a fable.

Bird stars newcomer Nykiya Adams—another in a long line of Arnold proving stellar at casting unknowns and non-actors and then getting revelatory turns out of them—as Bailey, a 12-year-old girl who spends most of her time furious at the world. (Otherwise known as “being 12-years-old.”) She lives in rundown apartment building—and really “rundown” barely covers it; this is a place ripe for the wrecking ball—with her father Bug (Keoghan, very funny and charming) and her slightly older half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda). And when we first meet her she’s got plenty of reason to be furious, as her father’s just suddenly announced he’s marrying his girlfriend Kayleigh (Frankie Box) of three whole months.

This news sends Bailey into a bit of a tailspin, although it’s hard to tell if she was already spinning before we walked in. (And it’s probably a safe assumption, that.) She’s not the only one—her brother, all of fourteen, also finds out he’s about to be a father. But Bailey is the one who Arnold follows, watching via her typically intimate square-screened style as Bailey cuts off her hair and starts trying to get in good with the local gang of hoods who’ve taken to video-taping their acts of criminality slash righteous vengeance.

That’s when something odd happens—and in 2024 it’s not a bad wager to put money on “something odd” in its cinematic form to be embodied by the wonderful German actor Franz Rogowski. And so it shall be. The sly-eyed star of Great Freedom and Passages plays here our titular Bird, an odd duck who early one morning wanders into a field where Bailey has slept out of spite toward her father. With spiky hair, an unplaceable accent, and rocking a long skirt, Bird couldn’t be more of a bolt out of the blue into Bailey’s world, but his story—and he is sticking to it—is that he was born in this place and he has now returned trying to find his long-lost parents.

Bailey has no idea what to make of this weirdo, and yet she can’t stop thinking about him—a malady familiar to anyone who’s ever watched Rogowski in a movie. Part of that might also be that she keeps seeing Bird teetering on the top ledges of buildings around her neighborhood after their initial meeting, though. He is, you might say, like a bird. (He’ll only fly away-ay.) And the film flirts with the reality of him every second he’s around—just naming his character “Bird” is for one hilarious, indicating that if he is indeed just a figment of Bailey’s imagination that she’s as basic as Holly Golightly was in the naming of her cat “Cat” in Breakfast at Tiffanys. Like cat, Bird doesn’t belong to anyone. Until the no-named slob does.

From there the film ping-pongs back and forth between Bailey’s antics around town—mostly avoiding her father, who’s relentlessly nagging at her to be a part of his wedding and to wear the purple plastic leopard-skin onesie that his bride-to-be is insisting all her bridesmaids wear—and her exploits with Bird, helping him try to find out where he came from and what happened to his disappeared family. This involves Arnold’s typical mega-doses of tension as every toddler within a fifty block radius seems on the verge of absolute ruin, but here, surprise of surprises, Arnold keeps answering every darkness with light.

When Bird tells Bailey after one of their more intense confrontations that he’s not a hero we have no reason to disbelieve him. But Bird the movie flirts with finding ways through it all toward heroism all the same. As its last act wanders into fantasticism—and if you’ve seen Alice Rohrwacher’s grand 2018 docu-drama Happy As Lazzaro then know that these two movies would make for a perfect double-feature—Arnold leaves it up to us to decide what’s actually at work. But in the end it seems to me that a good nature and some tenderness is her way through—and when not that, well then kicking the unholy ass of those who have it coming works too. This is the kind of Message Movie the people demand, dammit!

In all seriousness Bird floats high on lovely performances from everyone involved, and it shows an already exceptional filmmaker growing out in new, but previously lightly forecasted, directions. It’s not as if Fish Tank and American Honey, or her Wuthering Heights adaptation, didn’t have their own fits of magical thinking shining light into their dark corners too. But Bird, for all its very real and often senses of danger, is also eagerly open-hearted in a way that I didn’t predict going in. And that moved me deeply. Maybe all that time spent with that doomed cow in Cow did Andrea Arnold some good. Time with Bird will too.

‘Bird’ screened at the NewFest Film Festival.