My Thoughts on Broken Bird
Broken Bird features a mortician obsessed with taxidermy, which sounds grim, so I thought I'd give it a try as it wasn't originally on my list of films to watch.
In the film, we have Sybil, played by Rebecca Calder, someone who comes across as quite unsettling because she moves through her life like it’s a series of carefully measured rituals, each one feeling slightly off, and Calder’s performance is certainly the backbone of the film.
I don’t think I’ve seen someone hold a screen so steadily while simultaneously suggesting that they might snap at any second - she has this dry, regional accent that somehow intensifies her oddness, and the severe angles of her face make her expressions razor-sharp.
We also have Emma, the police detective played by Sacharissa Claxton, who is the other thread of the story, someone dealing with the loss of her infant son and trying to function in a world that keeps moving without regard for her grief.
I thought the contrast between Sybil and Emma would produce some explosive interplay, but the film spends a lot of time keeping them separate, where they cross paths occasionally, but rarely exchange anything that changes either of them, but both are interesting enough on their own, and the film seems to take pleasure in letting each character occupy her own isolated space.
Some parts of the film, however, pulled me out of the story, mainly the fantasy interludes that appear several times, with the intention of showing Sybil’s mental state,but they sometimes feel too indulgent, where they clash with the careful tension presented elsewhere.
The supporting cast are also good, especially Rupert Procter as Emma’s superior, who feels quietly competent, and James Fleet playing Sybil’s boss at the mortuary, and he’s both pathetic and slightly horrifying - a man so detached that the film opens with him napping on a slab.
It’s a strange choice, but it works, while Robyn Rainsford, too, gives depth to her role as a grieving fiancée, offering some of the film’s most human moments amid all the grotesque imagery.
There’s a lot of dark humor sprinkled throughout the film as well, and I didn’t expect to find myself smirking at a mortician trying to manipulate a grieving woman with drugged cake, yet the scene lands because it is handled with such deadpan precision.
It’s exactly the kind of weird, uncomfortable humor that works with Calder’s performance and the tone of the film, but some of the more grotesque or over-the-top imagined sequences undermine that balance - they feel like someone got carried away by their own creativity rather than letting the story breathe.
What’s interesting about Broken Bird is that it isn’t interested in conventional horror arcs, as there’s no clear climax where everything erupts - it’s about the way these characters inhabit their own forms of suffering, about watching people navigate extreme loneliness and obsession.
The horror is in the accumulation of small, unnerving details rather than big shocks or scares, and the film seems to take pleasure in being wrong, in showing us things we shouldn’t watch and making us think about why we are watching them.
And some of the scenes did have me questioning what the director wanted from the audience - whether they were aiming for absurdity, tension, or just a visual flourish - but I liked that the movie wasn’t afraid to be uncomfortable.
Broken Bird is a strange, grim, and oddly meticulous experience, and it’s not particularly satisfying in the sense of a traditional horror payoff, and that might frustrate some viewers, but I didn’t find the ending dramatic in the conventional sense, as I appreciated the restraint.
Where the movie succeeds though is in its ability to be unsettling without relying on cliches, and for that reason, I found it worth watching - but it's a film I feel won't be liked by the masses I suspect.