Broken Bird – FrightFest 2024

Writers: Dominic Brunt, Joanne Mitchell and Tracey Sheals based on an original story by Tracey Sheals

Director: Joanne Mitchell

In Joanne Mitchell’s Broken Bird a character remarks we always find our tribes in the end. Fair point- there are so many damaged individuals in the film Broken Birds might have been a more appropriate title.

Mortuary owner Mr Thomas (James Fleet) has a morbid obsession with his late wife and is first glimpsed reclining corpse-like on a slab. Police officer Emma (Jessica Yemi) has taken to drink after the mysterious disappearance of her son. By comparison Sybil Chamberlain (Rebecca Calder) seems a picture of mental health even though her hobbies are taxidermy and poetry. This impression does not last long. At age ten Sybil lost her entire family in a car accident and, in an effort to cope with loneliness, has slipped into wish-fulfilment fantasy with increasingly horrifying results.

Rebecca Calder gives a performance of growing derangement as Sybil. Initially she seems mischievous even charming. She interrupts a pretentious poetry reading by loudly gobbling crisps and trims her hair using the mortuary scissors. Upon meeting museum attendant Mark (Jay Taylor) she indulges in an Amélie style fantasy flirtation. But Sybil allows her judgemental attitude to shape her fantasies into full delusions. Not content with encouraging a woman abused in marriage to achieve catharsis by shouting at and striking the corpse of her abuser she later returns and mutilates the body and her revenge upon a woman she considers to be unfaithful is terrifying.

Director Joanne Mitchell (who co-wrote the script with Dominic Brunt and Tracey Sheals) avoids outright horror preferring a gothic even melodramatic atmosphere. Sybil favours blouses with regency style ruffles and the showdown occurs in a suitably eerie abandoned building.

Mitchell takes the viewer into Sybil’s twisted mindset. Her fantasy courtship of Mark is staged as a bright and cheerful 1950’s musical soap-opera romance. It is an inspired approach allowing comparison between the fantasy high-society lifestyle Sybil imagines and the mundane even squalid reality. Sybil’s transformation into a glamorous 1920’s flapper is revealed as a rather sad scene of Calder wearing too much make-up and kissing her own image in a mirror.

Despite the mortuary setting the issue of necrophilia does not occur. Sybil might imagine a mortuary corpse as a fantasy lover and even wake up embracing the body, but her sexual development is retarded at age ten when she lost her family. She is a chaste heroine; her delusions revolve around trying to find a substitute family rather than a lover.

This is not to say Sybil is a harmless fantasist. She has no concern for the impact which her actions have upon other people. Mr Thomas finds Sybil’s announcement that she is pregnant disquieting, possibly suspecting she intends to steal another woman’s child.

The contrast between Sybil’s idealised romantic fantasies and her brutal actions makes Broken Bird an uneasy but compelling study of a damaged individual.

BROKENBIRDwill open this year’s FrightFest with its World Premiere on 22nd August and will be coming to UK cinemas 30th August.