Out of Fantastic Fest, Cody Calahan’s Death of a Yellow Bird strikes the perfect balance between horror and emotion. The film nimbly zeroes in on the end-of-life experience—the regrets that flicker through one’s mind as death draws closer and the tingling warmth of a life generally well-lived. Calahan adeptly captures the beauty and pain of human existence in such bold colors that the film’s imprint on the viewer will never possibly fade. It’s not where we end up that matters the most, but the journey of meeting new people, doing new things, and seeing new places. In a single moment, Death of a Yellow Bird delivers both terror and gut-punching emotion, leaving the audience’s head spinning.
A terminally ill man (Ari Millen) heads to his old childhood home in the woods. He needs an escape and to make a plan about how to break the news to his son (Benjamin Sivcevic) that he’s refusing treatment. Doctors believe that in doing so, it’s not a matter of if but when. The cancer eats away at him, and he wants to choose when and how he goes out. He discovers a box of old VHS tapes from his childhood, some of which include footage of his brother Danny (Chance Orion Wood), who died when he was a child. The images flood his senses, and he determines exactly what he’ll do next. While he plots his final moments, he unwittingly records an eerie voice on a tape, unlocking a two-way line of communication with the spirit world. Given the home’s many sentimental treasures, he believes that the voice could be his late father trying to speak.
His mother also suffers from dementia and forgets that her husband and Danny are dead. Life seems to have trapped the man in an impossible situation. He doesn’t want to burden his wife and son and also doesn’t want to shrivel into a shell of his former self. Calahan lifts pages from his own life. “My heart and brain couldn’t deal with losing her,” the writer/director says in a statement about how his mother’s death forever changed him. “There was no cathartic moment,” he adds. Millen, his childhood friend and collaborator, approached Calahan about his own cancer diagnosis, and the two decided to pour their hearts into making Death of a Yellow Bird. That pure, raw intensity drenches the screen. Every frame aims to rip your heart out, either from extreme fear or pulverizing teardrops.
A film hasn’t shattered every bone in the body since David Bruckner’s The Night House, starring Rebecca Hall in a tremendous performance. Death of a Yellow Bird approaches death like an acrobat doing mind-melting stunts on a trapeze. Millen displays such agility in front of the camera that is nothing short of Oscar-worthy. From the quiet, whispered pleas for answers to the bombastic bursts of rage, the actor takes great care to present the entire breadth of humanity. It’s a jaw-dropping performance. The film arrives as primarily a one-man show, and in anyone else’s hands, the film would surely fall apart. Thankfully, Millen takes his life and offers it as a profound sacrifice to art, to living, and to dying.
Cody Calahan’s Death of a Yellow Bird somberly and delicately showcases the ephemeral nature of life. There’s no escaping death for any of us, but it’s what you do with the time you have that matters most. You can wallow, throw a pity party, or you can soak in the day. The man learns to accept the past through uncovering suppressed memories and makes peace with the cruel reality that death is knocking on his door. Death of a Yellow Bird emerges as a cinematic marvel and a testament to the simple power of honest storytelling.
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