BIRD
A Review by Ava Bellows
BIRD
Directed by Andrea Arnold
Viewed at the AFI Film Festival Los Angeles
**Spoiler Alerts throughout**
In Bird, Andrea Arnold captures how childhood wounds linger, the scars they leave shaping everything that follows. The film is relentless, built on sensation—sweat, slammed doors, loud music. Arnold’s camera moves constantly, refusing to let us settle in one frame, keeping us on edge just as Bailey is, navigating a world that doesn’t make space for comfort or healing. Bailey’s home is all chaos—noise and heavy silences, where adults fail her over and over, and the only stability is the mess itself.
Nykiay Adams plays Bailey in Andrea Arnold’s BIRD. Image courtesy of MUBI
Nykiya Adams carries the film with an unguarded openness, playing Bailey as someone both resilient and achingly vulnerable, her presence almost too big for the fractured life she’s been handed. Her father, Bug, played by Barry Keoghan, brings a mix of reckless charm and instability, constantly in motion but incapable of providing the grounding Bailey needs. Bug is both boyish and dangerous, with his quick engagement to a woman he barely knows and his strange fixation on selling hallucinogenic toad slime—a man still clinging to his own adolescence, even as Bailey needs him to be more.
Image from BIRD courtesy of MUBI
The contrast between Bailey’s chaotic world and Bird’s quiet presence couldn’t be more stark. Played by Franz Rogowski, Bird becomes the film’s steady heartbeat, his calm a balm to Bailey’s raw nerves. Where her life is noise and slammed doors, Bird offers room to breathe. He arrives in her life as if summoned—almost mythically, a gentle answer to her unspoken longing for something kind. Rogowski’s performance is beautifully restrained, all softness and subtlety. His Bird is not the usual savior figure; he doesn’t come with solutions or grand gestures. Instead, he offers Bailey a rare sense of safety, a reminder that there is kindness even in a world that seems built to bruise.
BIRD courtesy of MUBI
Rogowski brings an understated tenderness to Bird, his presence becoming a place where Bailey can simply exist, free from the expectations and failures of her family. Bird doesn’t try to fix her or ask anything of her. He’s simply there, offering a quiet comfort that feels both new and essential. It’s a performance filled with nuance, each look and gesture infused with a kindness that never demands attention but resonates deeply. His eyes, his movements, everything about him radiates a gentleness that stands in stark contrast to the violence and chaos that have marked Bailey’s life.
Arnold threads a subtle magic realism through Bird, an undercurrent that hums in the background, giving the story an almost mythical quality. Bird’s reappearance, after being presumed dead since childhood, feels like an answer to Bailey’s unspoken call, a quiet kind of miracle. Arnold doesn’t ask us to dissect this magic; it’s a truth felt rather than explained. Bird is simply Bird, a presence Bailey accepts without question. To try and define him would strip away the delicate mystery that makes him so magnetic. Arnold lets this magic breathe as a pulse beneath the film’s surface, something unspoken but deeply felt.
BIRD courtesy of MUBI
As the film closes, Arnold gives us a farewell between Bailey and Bird that is almost painfully gentle. Bird’s last words—“Don’t you worry—everything will be okay”—carry a weight that Bailey has longed for, a sliver of reassurance in a world that has rarely given her any. It’s a moment that lingers, a final act of kindness in a life filled with noise and fractured promises. Rogowski’s Bird doesn’t offer a resolution or a promise of redemption; he offers Bailey something softer, a reminder that amidst all her scars, there can be space to breathe.
Bird doesn’t fit neatly into the coming-of-age genre or the story of a girl who finds strength in adversity. Instead, it’s a film about the ways our scars shape us, about how we keep going in spite of them. Arnold doesn’t tie everything up or offer easy answers; she lets us sit with the mess, the ache, the beauty of resilience that’s quiet and tender. And in its honesty, Bird resonates deeply. It’s raw, it’s bruised, and above all, it’s human—capturing how, even in a life marked by pain, there is space for quiet, for gentleness, for connection that doesn’t need to be explained to be felt.
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