A Bird Flew In: Review

6th February 2022

Review: Straight Out of the Nest, ‘A Bird Flew In’ – By Tyler Simeone.

When lockdowns first began in March of last year, the sudden severance of a familiar routine had the effect of an old rug shaken out after decades in the attic: the loose stuff flung free, only the deep stains remained. A Bird Flew In, the COVID isolation drama from British debut director Kirsty Bell, probes at the relationship of a halted film’s cast and crew to their stains—an expecting couple’s strained home life, an actress’ maddening loneliness, an obsessive man’s voyeurism. Though often straining to maintain a balance between profound and ham-fisted, the film’s investigation into loneliness offers a welcome outstretched hand to the victims of the pandemic’s social rupture.

The most instantly—and patience-testingly—recognizable elements of the film are the “COVIDisms” in which it steeps. The pandemic’s presence is immediate and ubiquitous, communicated through everything from the warnings of radio broadcasts to the modified quotidian language exemplified by the new congé of “stay safe.”

This sort of overt dialogue alone (“Not like I’m going anywhere any time soon,” etc.) would not be frustrating beyond the viewer’s own weariness of corona-world language if it weren’t for the film’s consistent return to emotional hokiness. Its reliance on Al Joshua’s original soundtrack to express emotion—tenderly executed though it may be—elides the actors’ truly resonant performances, while voiceover narration of the poet Peter’s (Jeff Fahey) thoughts and cuts to flashback of his first encounter with love interest Anna (Julie Dray) at worst imply a mistrust of the audience’s ability to read affective bodily queues.

On the other hand, the film shines in its most quiet moments: when actress Rebecca—dazzlingly rendered by Camilla Rutherford in the film’s most poignant achievement—is left with no one to perform for, the camera watches as she talks to her teddy bear and decides to pour a little bit more into her cocktail glass. As she glides around her apartment and live streams her ranting “Weekly Whatever,” her slip into the delirium of loneliness is left mostly unscored and unnarrated. Given the space to breathe, the emotional power of these sequences is made exquisite. Where A Bird Flew In struggles, therefore, is in straddling the line between subtlety and egregiousness, its very palpable and often graciously expressed potential occasionally squandered by overexertion.

But perhaps this assessment is a bit too harsh: making a film at any time, let alone in the constraints of the early pandemic, is a feat worth applauding. And while it feeds its audience right from its hand, the obviousness of A Bird Flew In can be interpreted as a filmmaker’s attempt at processing and writing the history of a shock to the collective sensibility. Asserting that humans are in fact social animals, the film’s personal narratives reaffirm the need for connection and togetherness while elucidating the pandemic’s gift of relational unmasking. In other words, Bell expresses coronavirus’ destructive and constructive power: some of her characters lose their minds and their loved ones while others find new romance and rid themselves of formerly entrenched toxicities.

In the give and take of these narratives, the viewer is offered a reflection of the past two years in all their horrific and illuminating reality. When given the space to blossom, A Bird Flew In crafts intensely emotional validations of the pandemic’s best-of-times-worst-of-times complexities that ring fundamentally and honestly true. This is what it gives, but what it takes is patience, its maladroit writing and often maudlin beats a strain on a COVID-centric society’s burnt-out denizens. One could say more, but thankfully the film’s title offers its own metaphor: toddering out of the nest, the baby bird’s clumsiness presages a plummet, but when its little wings finally catch the air, it’s oh so graceful.

Images courtesy of Goldfinch Productions.

Facebook

Google

Twitter

We hope you're enjoying BRWC. You should check us out on our social channels, subscribe to our newsletter, and tell your friends. BRWC is short for battleroyalewithcheese.