Barry Keoghan is charismatic and incredibly sad in the magical British drama Bird

Bird is for every lost child who wishes someone would have stood up and defended them. It’s a fragile but beautiful vision, and marks the strongest blend yet of Andrea Arnold’s primary directives as a filmmaker. There have been her stories of young, working-class women in search of their own liberation, such as Mia in her 2009 breakout Fish Tank or Star in her US-set 2016 film American Honey. And there have been stories about the dignity and inner life bestowed on all creatures, as exemplified by her 2022 documentary Cow, shot over the course of four years on an industrial dairy farm. Bird fuses both.

Twelve-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) has no one to fight her corner. Her dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), whose name refers to the creepy crawlies tattooed all over his skin, had her and her older brother Hunter (Jason Buda) when he was only a teen. Now, he spends his days zipping around the neighbourhood on his scooter, and (somehow) acquiring a Colorado River toad he plans to scrape enough hallucinogenic slime off to fund his wedding with a woman he’s known only a handful of months, Kayleigh (Frankie Box).

Bug never had the chance to revel in the freedoms of youth, and his stunted wilfulness and impulsive behaviour feels potentially harmful to his kids. Keoghan is brilliant here, his boisterous charisma masking deep, penetrative sadness. Meanwhile, Bailey’s mother (Jasmine Jobson) lives across town, where there are three other kids to care for and an abusive new boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) lurking in the bedroom.

Bird (a lovable Franz Rogowski) tumbles into Bailey’s life out of nowhere, pixieish in spirit, gentle and inscrutable. He wants to find his family. He doesn’t have a phone. She has no idea where he sleeps at night. Bird simply appears when he’s needed. Is it pure eccentricity or something more? Arnold has never before made this explicit a fairytale (even her adaptation of Wuthering Heights was stripped of its supernatural elements) but she doesn’t let the question of reality versus fantasy overwhelm her narrative. Ultimately, this isn’t about who Bird is but what he represents to Bailey.

Arnold’s regular cinematographer Robbie Ryan shoots in 16mm with visible, frayed edges. It’s an analogue way to reflect how Bailey digitally documents her environment on her phone, later projecting the videos on her wall – often it’s birds, but she’s a perceptive kid, constantly taking in snippets of conversation and minor details of people’s lives.

Bird is very much about the desire to see and to be seen, to not constantly live with your back exposed. What can feel like an outstretched hand in a moment of need? When Bailey gets her first period, she sheepishly sidles up to her future stepmother’s bed, braced (it seems) for some kind of confrontation. But Kayleigh, while groggy, fumbles for her purse and takes out a tampon and a box of prescription painkillers. “I got you,” she says. “Don’t worry. You’ll live.” In that moment, Arnold makes her kindness sound like music.

Dir: Andrea Arnold. Starring: Nykiya Adams, Barry Keoghan, Franz Rogowski, Jason Buda, Jasmine Jobson, Frankie Box, James Nelson-Joyce. Cert 15, 119 mins

‘Bird’ is in cinemas from 8 November