Andrea Arnold’s latest film, BIRD, is a beguiling blend of British social realism and magical realism, exposing the deep yearning towards nature in a dying England left adrift at the end of the world. Incredible performances from Barry Keoghan and Nykika Adams keep the film grounded while Franz Rogowski soars as a mysterious and gentle stranger. It’s an astonishing piece of work that beautifully extends the audience’s sympathies to everyone in the film and expresses a joyous love of nature in every frame.

We first meet Bailey (Nykika Adams) filming a gull flying overhead with her iPhone camera pointed through the bars of a railway bridge. It’s a potent first image: at first glance, the gull appears to be behind bars, but it’s actually Bailey who is in the cage-like structure yearning for the freedom of the bird. Bailey is twelve years old, living on an estate in Gravesend, Kent, with her dad Bug (Barry Keoghan) and her brother Hunter (Jason Buda). Her life is disrupted by Bug announcing his dream to marry his new girlfriend with money obtained from selling the drug-like excretions of a toad and by Hunter starting a vigilante group (doing the work that “the old bill should be doing”). After witnessing her brother’s gang bring justice to a local abuser, she flees to the safety of a field, where she discovers roaming horses and the mysterious figure of Bird (Franz Rogowski).

“Franz Rogowski shows his talent for disappearing into a role as shown in TRANSIT, UNDINE, and PASSAGES, completely transforming into this enigmatic figure while suggesting hidden depths of sadness and rage beneath his gentle shell.”

Bird is a fey, puckish figure: unconventional, unusual, and quietly gender nonconforming. In their first encounter, he disarms Bailey’s instinctive distrust of strangers with his gentle demeanour and strange way of moving through the world. Franz Rogowski shows his talent for disappearing into a role as shown in TRANSIT, UNDINE, and PASSAGES, completely transforming into this enigmatic figure while suggesting hidden depths of sadness and rage beneath his gentle shell. As Bailey assists Bird in his wandering quest to find his family, she discovers a kinship with him and how they both enrich one another’s lives.

The film’s title proves apt as Arnold’s story flits between the ground through the day-to-day nature of Bailey’s working class life and the sky through the magical realist elements that feel woven through the film from the start but only really emerge towards the narrative’s end. It is remarkable how coherent BIRD feels while stitching together these two very different modes in an intriguing blend of Ken Loach and Alice Rohrwacher.

The blend produces something thematically similar to Zoe Gilbert’s novel Mischief Acts, in which something long-dormant returns to a lost and dying England. The film’s first scenes resonate strongly with the sense that something, some innocence or some sense of justice, has been lost. We feel that society is on the edge of collapse – aided by broadcasts in the background of shots showing wildfires and climate destruction – and that nature needs to reemerge, to intervene. Through this lens, Bird’s sudden appearance is like that of a spirit of the wilds or the land itself, returning to right the wrongs done to its people.

“BIRD leads to the kind of powerful posthumanist message that was implied in Arnold’s previous film, COW, where she filmed the titular animal protagonist with the same dignity and respect that she would film a human…”

BIRD leads to the kind of powerful posthumanist message that was implied in Arnold’s previous film, COW, where she filmed the animal protagonist with the same dignity and respect that she would film a human, striving to “show the character and the aliveness of a nonhuman animal”. BIRD similarly resounds with the message that all life – human or nonhuman, gentle or fierce – matters: gulls wheeling over English council estates, bees struggling against window panes, horses wandering one of the few green spaces available to them, are all important and meaningful creatures in a natural world that has been perverted. Even Bug, played by Keoghan with an abusive energy at the start of the film and a wild kind of pathos towards the end, receives redemption of a sort and is recognised as a person with dreams that really, really, really could happen. “No one’s no one, Bailey,” Hunter tells her towards the film’s end.

Despite these lofty thematic heights, BIRD remains grounded in Bailey’s coming-of-age story, and Nykika Adams’ performance stands alongside Keoghan and Rogowski, imbuing Bailey with a yearning for nature that permeates the whole film. By the end, we feel we have seen something important, magical, and beautiful: something in the shape of a bird overhead.