Filmmakers create alternative worlds in their work by both design and necessity, but often in their endeavor to recreate naturalism they do the opposite and show us things we’ve never seen before. It’s difficult to determine what Andrea Arnold’s intentions are in the somewhat fanciful Bird, which is centered on a community of squatters in an English suburb. The central family consists of a young single father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), and his two children, 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) and 17-year-old Hunter (Jason Buda), who are products of two different women. Bug was obviously a teen when Hunter was born, and now Hunter, it seems, is about to be a father himself. Moreover, Bug has just gotten engaged to a woman he met 3 months ago, a prospect Bailey finds repugnant. Nevertheless, Bug insists she be a bridesmaid and asserts his admittedly dodgy parental authority, a turn that at first feels borderline abusive but, as it turns out, is more along the lines of Bug trying to be responsible in his own way. The dynamics here are both naturalistic and tragic, though Arnold’s purposes are murky.

Bailey is the movie’s center, and her view of the world is characteristically wondrous. She dreams of flying and seems attracted to birds in ways that have a magical quality to them. At one point she helps Hunter communicate with his pregnant girlfriend, who has been confined to her bedroom by her parents in an attempt to discourage Hunter. Bailey enlists the help of a crow, which delivers Hunter’s message to the girl by flying to her window. Bailey’s affinity for animals, especially feathered ones, is not primal but intuitive, as if she knew something about them other people didn’t, but it’s also easy to guess that it’s all in her young head. Still, she’s not a fantasist. She sees the awfulness of the situation across town at her mother’s apartment, which the mother shares with Bailey’s half-sisters and a truly abusive boyfriend who makes Bug look like St. Francis. But what to make of the title character, a man-child (Franz Rogowski) whom Bailey stumbles upon while walking in a field and who says he’s looking for the wastrel father who abandoned him as a child. Bird has learned he lives nearby, and Bailey offers to help him, though the viewer may wonder at times if Bird isn’t also at least partly a product of her imagination, even when he saves her life.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, because it’s essentially Bailey’s movie. We’re just invited into those episodes that Arnold thinks are important for understanding how a girl living under such circumstances copes with those circumstances. Hunter copes by becoming a vigilante against the kind of serial abusers this environment engenders. Bailey is not so proactive, but she is honest, which is why she bristles at Bug’s striving for domestic normality amidst a life of economic and emotional chaos, even if she loves him in spite of the chaos. The world Arnold describes is both believable and confounding, and vivid to the max. 

Though it may be unnecessarily reductive to point out right off the bat that actor and novice director Ariane Labed is married to Greek provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos, such intelligence makes it easier to understand the weirdness of her first feature, September Says, which, like Bird, envisions a world conjured by adolescent sensibilities. Based on a novel, the story centers on two sisters who are inseparable due to their total self-isolation from conventional society, not to mention from their confused single mother (Rakhee Thakrar), who, as the movie opens, seems to have decided long ago that the world her daughters inhabit is unassailable. 

September is the name of the older sister (Pascale Kann), who lords it over the younger one, July (Mia Tharia), with the latter’s full consent. Often communicating in a language that consists of animal noises, the girls are summarily shunned at school as weirdos. Consequently, July counts on September to protect her from reality and thus submits to her sister’s every whim, no matter how strange it may be. Violence ensues, not out of necessity but rather as a function of inevitability given the odd universe these girls move through. Their mother moves them from what appears to be the English countryside to a cabin in rural Ireland, where things become even stranger. 

Effectively creepy and dramatically fascinating, September Says isn’t very coherent. The set pieces have power but feel like a series of non sequiturs—they don’t hang together in a way that would make sense of this rarefied world and the people who inhabit it. Had Labed attempted something like a horror movie, she might have found a more consistent tone and some relevant theme to latch on to. This is mostly mood in search of an idea. 

Bird opens Sept. 5 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (03-5367-1144), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707). 

September Says opens Sept. 5 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Cinema Qualite Shinjuku (03-3352-5645), White Cine Quinto Shibuya (03-6712-7225).

Bird home page in Japanese

September Says home page in Japanese

Bird photo (c) 2024 House Bird Limited, Ad Vitam Production, Arte France Cinema, British Broadcasting Corporation, The British Film Institute, Pinky Promise Film Fund II Holdings LLC, FirstGen Content LLC and Bird Film LLC

September Says photo (c) Sackville Film and Television Productions Limited/MFB GmbH/Crybaby Limited, British Broadcasting Corporation, ZDF/arte 2024