VIFF 2024 | Barry Keoghan Lets 'Bird' Fly Away

"I don't care about your dream."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2024—Bird may not be the British filmmaker's best film, but it is certainly the most Andrea Arnold film she has ever made. Known for a trademark sense of social realism to her naturalistic cinematic style exploring otherwise unseen working-class subcultures of the impoverished, Arnold's latest continues to explore a young person's coming-of-age point-of-view to their bleak world.

Starring another one of Arnold's unknown child actor finds, Nykiya Adams, as the wise beyond her years Bailey, the hard-headed twelve-year-old daughter to a young single father (a heavily tattooed Barry Keoghan), we follow her modest life wandering the streets, her strained family relationships in her broken home, and navigating strange social situations. Slowly though, audiences are introduced to slightly more and more fantastical elements concerning Franz Rogowski's title character and his sudden, somewhat magical appearance in town in search of his own lost family.

Arnold's transfixing eye and penchant for character development through non-verbal acting and following actors in their environments make Bird's late-stage flights of supernatural fancy all the more surreal in their magical realism. Adams and Keoghan are dynamite as a dysfunctional family set against the sleepy seaside English town's neighbourhood backdrop in a squatter's flat in northern Kent. Beyond any miserablism, the slice-of-life fairytale of a film mirrors the otherwise downtrodden setting still filled with moments of joy.

Bird screened at the 2024 Vancouver International Film Festival as part of the Special Presentations series at the Vancouver Playhouse.


More | YVArcade / Destination / Indiewire / Paste