Vague Visages’ Bird review contains minor spoilers. Andrea Arnold’s 2024 movie features Nykiya Adams, Franz Rogowski and Barry Keoghan. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

British filmmaker Andrea Arnold has always been obsessed with innocence — the idea of it, who gets to experience it, where it goes. All of her films attempt to capture naïveté’s spectre, lending a tangible presence, the kind necessary to be rendered cinematic. In Fish Tank (2009), youthful determination takes the form of a horse, all matted fur and tugging at its chain. In Wuthering Heights (2011), similar ideas are emblazoned in the swaying heather of the Mournes. In Bird, the symbol for innocence is (somewhat appropriately or predictably) birds. 

Unfortunately, Arnold’s metaphor feels especially heavy-handed, and the filmmaker’s initial shot-making affirms this. In the first scene, Bailey (Nykiya Adams) has a chipped camera phone tilted upwards, peering out through the metal grating of a nearby bridge, filming the birds that flock around. The teenage protagonist is sensitive to the unrestrained wildness of her father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), and without any real friends to alleviate such burdens. Early on, after a particularly fraught fight, Bailey flees to a nearby field — the kind of untended path of wildness on the outskirts of every town in the UK. One morning, a mysterious man named Bird (Franz Rogowski) approaches Adams’ character, undeterred by her dismissiveness, a gentle breeze amidst the harsh concrete of her world. Arnold’s direction later is imbued with more meaningful implications, but the film never transcends that early staleness. 

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Bird’s demeanour is unsettling, indicative of something otherworldly amidst the mundanity. He is able to speak to Bailey’s particular struggles, which he randomly acknowledges in the aftermath of a long day: “You’re used to sorting it out, aren’t you? Taking care of things yourself?” There is a version of this story where Bird’s gentleness acts as a catalyst for the protagonist’s coming-of-age experience, but Rogowski’s performance is overly mannered, each lurch, wink and high-pitched trill signposting the final act’s magical realist twist. Still, it’s a lovely idea that a character like Bailey — who lives an unsupervised and borderline unacknowledged existence — receives a fairy godmother in the shape of Bird. Unfortunately, this leads the film away from Arnold’s traditional observational style into a less-inspired filmmaking, with the maddening blurriness of early shots rendered static and uninteresting. 

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There is an intriguing idea that Arnold weaves throughout Bird, one that flows naturally from Bailey’s isolation. The protagonist always films the world around her —  innocuous interactions locked in her old iPhone for safekeeping. It could be a butterfly on her windowsill, the sky or a stranger from afar: all of it is caught and painstakingly preserved. It’s hard to remove this from Arnold’s own life; a young girl who channels her relative anonymity into the crudest, purest form of filmmaking. When Bailey plays back moments from her day on a dinky projector, she essentially rewrites her life, applying a fairytale filter to otherwise unremarkable moments. It’s unfortunate that Arnold wasn’t able to achieve something as vulnerable and raw with Bird as a whole.

Anna McKibbin (@annarosemary) is a freelance film critic. She received a journalism MA from City University and specializes in pop culture. Anna has written for London Film School, Film Cred and We Love Cinema.

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