Andrea Arnold gives difficult young people time to show what they cannot say. We admire her compassionate, often moving films, though she is more reliable with actors than with stories: the hardship can feel forced, and the comfort can come too easily.
Fi1m perspective
On a squat roof in Bird (2024), Bailey films a gull with her headphones in. Nykiya Adams does little to explain the girl, and Arnold does not ask her to. The shot lasts long enough for that small occupation to feel like a means of getting away. Arnold is good at giving such moments time, particularly when a child has little control over what the adults around her will do.
Her early work, from the short Wasp (2003) to her first feature, Red Road (2006), established her attention to working-class lives. By Fish Tank (2009), she was concentrating on a teenager whose aggression could hide uncertainty. The American road story American Honey (2016) took her interest in marginalised youth beyond Britain, while Cow (2021) marked a move into documentary. With Bird, she returns to British adolescence and makes room for a fairy tale.
Fish Tank remains our stronger recommendation, because Katie Jarvis makes Mia’s defiance and embarrassment equally believable. We were moved by the dance scenes: Jarvis makes the effort so personal and important that we stopped measuring whether Mia was any good. Michael Fassbender’s Connor brings the unease of adult attention that can flatter before it alarms, and Arnold allows that confusion into their encounters. The writing occasionally adds one difficulty too many, but she never makes Mia’s bad behaviour a reason to stop caring about her.
Cinematographer Robbie Ryan is central to that closeness, keeping Mia near enough for the doubt beneath the aggression to register. Helen Scott’s production design gives the family scenes cramped, convincing rooms, where nobody seems to have much space to themselves. In Bird, Ryan’s handheld camera stays by Bailey’s shoulder, where adults can arrive as torsos and noise. The birds and insects she films belong to Arnold’s recurring interest in animals, but here they also give a quiet girl something to look at besides her family.
Adams, making her first film, is a reason to see Bird despite its less disciplined storytelling. Barry Keoghan gives Bailey’s feckless father some welcome humour, while Franz Rogowski’s gentle stranger is harder for Arnold to fit into the drama. The fairy tale offers more sweetness than the film has earned. Start with Fish Tank; come to Bird for the girl, without expecting the story around her to be as persuasive.
Biography
Andrea Arnold is an English filmmaker and former actor. Born on 5 April 1961 in Dartford, Kent, she began her career in children's television as a presenter and actor on shows including No. 73 before studying at the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles.
She directed the award-winning short film Wasp (2003), which received an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. Her feature films include Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009), Wuthering Heights (2011) and American Honey (2016), each of which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. She has also directed episodes of Transparent (2014–2017) and all seven episodes of the second season of Big Little Lies (2017), and made the documentary Cow (2022). Her most recent feature, Bird (2024), for which she wrote the screenplay, premiered at Cannes.
