It’s always excting when a story begins. A young self assured child embarks on a daring quest to conquer a dragon, climb a beanstalk, or escape from a witch. The main characters in classic fairy tales are largely young children, forced to grow up faster due to tragic circumstances, and in the story they overcome the trauma of their past and come outside the other end as a better more perfect version of the person they were before.

The town of Gravesend (a town in North Kent, England) might not be the most magical of places, more monotonous than anything for our hero, it still the setting for Andrea Arnold’s latest film ‘Bird‘. Bailey (Nykiya Adams) is a twelve year old girl who lives with her father Bug (Barry Keoghan) in a run down apartment alongside her brother Hunter (Jason Buda). Bug is not the perfect picture of fatherhood, blasting onto the film on an electric scooter, covered in bug tattoos, shirtless, and professing to his twelve year old daughter that he plans on marrying a woman he just met.

Bailey is outraged. Outraged that she has to go to the wedding, outraged that she was the last to know, and more than anything, she’s outraged that she once again has to play the parent to her hare brained father. After arguing with her father about the consequences of marrying a woman he barely knows, she goes to hang out with her half brother Hunter, who on the flip side of Bug, flat out refuses to see Bailey as anything other than a child.

‘Bird’ is at once both about children who are forced to grow up too fast, to take the responsibility of the world on their shoulders, and about the inability for children to ever really be seen as adults, even as the world demands it of them. The world that Bug is leaving Bailey is not one she can succeed in, it’s falling apart, and yet it’s her job to manage it. It is at once both boring and terrifying in it’s predestined failure. As she fights to navigate this world she meets a strange man named Bird (Franz Rogowski), who is the first person that seems to see Bailey for who she is, and the crossroads in maturing that she’s at.

So much is woven into the fabric of the film that absolutely sings, from the fairytale tempo of the story, to the performances, particularly those by Barry Keoghan and Nykiya Adams. Bug has a pitch perfect delivery when he realizes that Bailey does not care about his hasty engagement “What do you mean you don’t care about my dream?” is the perfect encapsulation of entitlement the older generation puts on the younger after having destroyed their world.

There are things to be picked at for sure, in a display I haven’t experienced since ‘The Return of the King‘ I thought credits were going to roll at least four separate times as the film was reaching it’s end. But even with marginally overstaying it’s welcome I have so much love for this indie darling.

4/5