FrightFest 2024: ‘Broken Bird’ is quite the acting showcase for Rebecca Calder

Death can take an immense toll on the heart and mind. It can leave you gasping for breath and wallowing in a pit of grief and anguish. With Broken Bird, director Joanne Mitchell sculpts a powerful and unsettling character study about one young woman’s inability to understand death. On script co-written with Dominic Brunt, Mitchell lifts from Tracey Sheals’ original story and delivers a film that twists the knife and forces the audience to question their own relationship with death.

Broken Bird flutters through the ripped pages of Sybil’s (Rebecca Calder) life. Having lived an idyllic, privileged childhood, she suffered an unimaginable tragedy when her entire family died in a car crash. She was left alone and isolated in the world. Bullied in school, she came to depend on only herself to get through life. But her understanding of her family’s demise is left in question. She doesn’t quite comprehend their deaths, made worse when, as an adult, she becomes a mortician. Working with the dead daily further separates her from the delicate balance of life and death – also marked by a fascination with taxidermy in her spare time.

New to town, Sybil takes on a job working under Mr. Thomas (James Fleet) at his mortuary. Life settles into place, and it appears she has put the past behind her. That is until she falls for a museum worker named Mark (Jay Taylor). She mistakes his kindness for flirting and becomes obsessed with him. Not only does the meaning of death elude her, she harbors delusions about what it means to love and be loved. As Sybil discovers, Mark is engaged to another woman, leading Sybil to take a hard corner in her life. Her anger leads her to do dangerous, murderous things that change the entire course of the film.

Calder delivers an oddball take, leaning into Sybil’s aloof, cold nature. Akin to Angela Bettis’ magnificent turn in 2002’s May, Calder’s embodiment of a lost, tortured, and broken soul emerges as one of 2024’s most fascinating and gripping performances. She delicately infuses Sybil with a raw vulnerability and a razor-sharpness that cuts deep. It’s disturbing the way she peers into your soul, radiating from the screen and jumping into the audience’s body.

As Broken Bird unravels, Sybil falls further into disrepair. Her fantasies clutch tighter around her throat. Reality slips away, and she’s only left with her desire to have a family. In the film’s secondary storyline, a young woman named Emma (Sacharissa Claxton) blames herself for the death of her son and drunkenly calls her ex about the misery thrashing in her chest. Furthermore, she endured her son’s body being stolen from a funeral home, and the police hunt for answers has yielded nothing substantial. The two threads appear unrelated, but Mitchell incrementally ties the stories together until they collide in an explosive and fiery end.

Joanne Mitchell’s Broken Bird surfaces as an exemplary piece of cinema. It claws at the viewer. It burns in a way that turns the skin into melted plastic. You get the sense that something wicked is happening, even if you can’t quite put your finger on it. It’s worth the price of admission for Rebecca Calder alone.

Broken Bird made its world premiere at this summer’s FrightFest.

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