Bird is for every lost child who wishes someone would have stood up and defended them. It’s a fragile but beautiful vision, and marks the strongest blend yet of Andrea Arnold’s primary directives as a filmmaker. There have been her stories of young, working-class women in search of their own liberation, such as Mia in her 2009 breakout Fish Tank or Star in her US-set 2016 film American Honey. And there have been stories about the dignity and inner life bestowed on all creatures, as exemplified by her 2022 documentary Cow, shot over the course of four years on an industrial dairy farm. Bird fuses both.
Twelve-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) has no one to fight her corner. Her dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), whose name refers to the creepy crawlies tattooed all over his skin, had her and her older brother Hunter (Jason Buda) when he was only a teen. Now, he spends his days zipping around the neighbourhood on his scooter, and (somehow) acquiring a Colorado River toad he plans to scrape enough hallucinogenic slime off to fund his wedding with a woman he’s known only a handful of months, Kayleigh (Frankie Box).
