Those on the margins see everything. It’s just that no one sees them.
(Ocean Vuong)
A coming-of-age story set among the social ruins of Kent. A twelve-year-old, Bailey, forced to move too quickly in an environment that taught her from the very beginning that nothing is guaranteed. Played by debutante Nykiya Adams, she is immersed among established figures like Franz Rogowski and Barry Keoghan, reduced to a tattooed body trying to be a father without knowing what it means.
Bug is, in fact, a boy who became a parent at 14. Now, he’s ready to marry Kayleigh, another young mother, as if repeating the same mistake with a different face were an evolution. They are getting married on Saturday, and the bridesmaids – girls like Bailey – will have to wear leopard-print pink onesies with sequins, while loud music bounces off the walls of a house invaded by insects, dirt, graffiti, and chaos. The hallucinogenic mucus produced by a frog is at the center of a domestic microeconomy, traded as “a golden goose.”
Bailey lives amidst this broken cycle: younger siblings to protect, a potentially violent stepfather, an absent mother, a neighborhood that offers no alternatives. The world around her is saturated with frustration, abandonment. Violence is not the exception: it is the norm.
Around her, childhood has long since disappeared, replaced by a form of early, raw survival, memorized and learned. A gang of kids occupies a ruined house: Bailey watches, runs, screams. Horses appear in the countryside, the wind rises, something ancient and animalistic stirs.
Her existence is a balancing act on the thin line between the real and the mirage. Her body changes, codes multiply, and fear lurks in the small daily gestures: Skate, her mother's partner, might one day explode. And if not, he would be the exception to a brutal rule. Skate has already killed the family dog with a kick, as you’d squash an annoyance.
In this polluted space, Bailey meets Bird – a man out of time, perhaps out of reality. An outsider, someone who wanders aimlessly and without excuses. Rogowski plays him as a presence halfway between the real and the virtual, and it’s precisely for this reason that he is essential. He is not a savior. He does not bring answers. But amidst the noise, he observes and listens. He climbs rooftops, does a little dance, tells stories about a father whose name he doesn’t know and a mother who may have thrown herself into a swamp. In a moment of pain, Bailey asks him, “Do you know what crushing is?” – as if pain were the only way to try to be real.
Arnold doesn’t change register: handheld camera, close to bodies, glued to eyes. The point of view is Bailey’s: her confusion, her search, her silence. The film doesn’t build a plot: it observes. It cuts moments and lets them live. It doesn’t judge. It doesn’t beautify. Everything is left raw.
The post-punk of Fontaines D.C. opens and closes the film like an electric shock. “Is it too real for ya?” they ask, but perhaps it’s the opposite: it’s too unreal to be ignored. The world Arnold films is one in which growing up is an act of survival and self-defense, not a path. Bird is a parenthesis, a human contact that expects nothing but makes the weight of life a moment lighter.
At the heart of the film, Bailey watches a video and smiles: it’s a brief moment of respite, maybe a memory, maybe just a fantasy. She takes her sisters and brother to the beach with Bird. In the water, Bailey screams, “There are fish!” – as if to say that maybe something still lives beneath it all.
There’s a precise idea: marginality doesn’t need explanations; it needs to be seen and recognized. Bailey is not an exemplary victim. She’s alive, and that’s enough. Arnold follows her without mythologizing her, and for this reason, he manages to tell us something deeper: adolescence, for many, is already an after, it’s already too much.
Bird doesn’t console. It records. Andrea Arnold makes her most direct, perhaps her most effective, film. No aestheticization of misery, just the stubborn attempt to give back a gaze that is often ignored, with a distorted fairy tale.
Changing skin is the only way we have to stay.
(Chandra Livia Candiani)
