Flights of fancy: "Bird"

Returning to the fictions of Brexit Britain after the overseas awayday of 2016's American Honey and the 2021 documentary Cow, Andrea Arnold opens her latest, Bird, with a sequence that plays almost like a French-and-Saunders-style parody of the Arnold aesthetic: a moptopped youngster, with dirt under her fingernails and a generally dreamy mien, is interrupted while filming a bird in flight through the metal cage of a motorway bridge by the arrival of a twinkly-eyed, heavily tattooed Irish charmer on a scooter touting a toad in a KwikSave bag. After two breaks from the auteurist norm, the new film feels to some degree like business as usual in Arnold-land. Once more, the camera arrives at a fringey Estuary setting (here, Gravesend), a menagerie of furred and feathered friends is emptied out before us (that bird and toad are just for starters) and we're introduced to a wild-leaning heroine - potentially as feral as any of the other creatures on screen - who's trying to figure out her place in this world. For Bailey (Nykiya Adams), the initial goal is to extricate herself from the chaos of the squat she's living in with that twinkly-eyed charmer (Barry Keoghan's Bug) and his young bride, who barely seem that much older themselves, and a brother (who may more precisely be a half-brother or a stepbrother: the chaos is partly that of broken homes) drifting aimlessly into crime. An early scene finds Bailey lopping off her abundant curls, the better to see clearer or redefine herself; and after waking up in a field, our heroine is duly presented with another migratory path, that of a heavily accented drifter in a dress, who introduces himself as Bird and promptly takes up residence atop an adjacent block of flats, watching over our girl. As he's played by Franz Rogowski, the philandering agent of chaos in last year's Passages, you could be forgiven for wondering whether Bird is less guardian angel than dreadful augury. He's inarguably an odd bird, though, and so is the film, for better and worse.

Having reassured us with that opening sequence, Bird quickly drifts further away from everyday British normality than Arnold has ever previously ventured. Yes, this camera takes in shopping precincts, towerblocks and bunkbeds alike, but the logic guiding its movements is dreamier than that of, say, 2006's Red Road or 2009's Fish Tank, synching with a heroine who forever seems on the verge of nodding off or waking up. (It explains Bailey's air of drowsiness, but the squat situation looks implausible in 2024, no matter how overstretched the authorities might be; these broken homes have been fractured altogether artfully.) Bird only begins to function narratively if we accept that Arnold has left social realism behind so as to flirt with magical realism, the trickiest of all genres to pull off in a cinema, dependent as it is on the viewer believing their eyes at all times. I fear it also only works if we then accept Arnold's redefinition of magical realism as "a series of random, mostly unconnected events". Gravesend here represents a fairytale kingdom, which may be a stretch for those who've never been there, and even for those who call it their home. The characters assume the same symbolic value as the caged pets and wild horses of Fish Tank: as his name indicates, Bird is less flesh-and-blood man than he is roaming metaphor, a representative of those migrants who have flocked to the Kent coast, and a model of a softer masculinity than Keoghan's brawling chancer or the toxic new boyfriend of Bailey's estranged mum. The "it really, really, really could happen" of Blur's "The Universal", which Arnold deploys as a recurring nursery rhyme or contemporary lullaby, sounds ever more like a director imploring us to close our eyes and take a leap of faith with her.

Above all else, Bird has visibly been conceived as a hangout movie: arrive at an interesting, underfilmed location with bankable actors, a bunch of kids, an e-scooter and a Spotify playlist and start to thrash something out on the spot before the rolling camera. That search for spontaneity yields convincing bursts of chaos, like the party scene where Keoghan and his fellow squatters do shots and shout along to Sleaford Mods, drowning out a TV bringing news of the effects of climate change on central Europe. (Arnold is not incorrect in intuiting everyone's looking for an escape of some kind right now.) And every now and again, we spy an inspired choice, something precise, evocative and lovely: cutaways to the squat's youngest inhabitant reveal a tousle-haired girl indifferent to the mess around her and determined to press on with her colouring-in regardless. As ever, Arnold proves in thrall to the adaptability of the young - but is she also getting a bit too hung up on it? There is, regrettably, a lot of flapping around where you want Bird to soar: all the graffiti doodled on squat walls and bus windows can't make up, in this instance, for characters that struggle to hold the attention and a wider failure to pursue angles for further dramatic exploration in anything like the satisfying depth of Arnold's earlier work. (Keoghan, notionally Bird's most saleable asset in our accursed, post-Saltburn universe, is the biggest victim of this, either sidelined or forgotten about in the edit.) What's flown the coop is the vice-like plotting of Red Road and Fish Tank, artefacts from a moment when Arnold was presumably still having to present a case to funding bodies in the form of a script rather than - as one assumes happened here - pitching a feature that came to her in a dream and then trying to fill in the gaps around a handful of key images. I don't want to be too down on something so idiosyncratic and personal: this is, after all, the version of this story only this filmmaker could have arrived at, a Wings of Desire raised on party rings and Greggs sausage rolls. But Bird finally lands among Arnold's weakest films, as sorely overstretched at two hours as American Honey was pushing three. It pains me to say it, but one of our best modern directors is going backwards.

Bird opens in selected cinemas from Friday.