Fragile Male Pride Laid Bare in Birdeater
The debut feature from young Australian filmmakers Jack Clark and Jim Weir, Birdeater tears into cinemas this week after taking out the Best Australian Narrative Feature audience award at last year’s Sydney Film Festival. Young couple Louie and Irene are engaged, and at the last minute Louie invites Irene to his bucks weekend.
What follows is a nerve-shredding experience doused in dread, paranoia and substance-fueled masculine pride. Borrowing in large part from Ozploitation classic Wake In Fright (1971), it uses the narrative contrivance of a bucks weekend gone feral to tease out some seriously uncomfortable truths about relationships, masculinity and marriage.
The first thing that immediately jumps out at you about Birdeater is the editing. The edit by Ben Anderson moves at a pace that propels you through the narrative without giving you whiplash, and begins to take on the time-warping effects of drugs and alcohol as those substances begin to take hold of our characters. It’s also an intentionally hilarious film, in large part due to the edit. Some of the biggest jokes and laughs are found in the reactions of characters to horrendous social faux pas, but the real magic trick Birdeater pulls off is to then slowly curdle those laughs into scares more effective than many horror films.
Also key to the success of Birdeater is the ensemble cast, all of whom embody their characters really nicely. The standout performance, though, is without a doubt that from Ben Hunter, who plays Louie’s unpredictable childhood friend Dylan. For me, it is Hunter’s performance that really makes the emotional thread in Birdeater sing; what could otherwise have been a very tiresome retread of Australian masculine tropes transforms into something much more nuanced and self aware.
The question about the film’s subject matter takes a necessary turn as the evening becomes more and more feral; is it possible to depict misogyny on screen while the film maintains a safe distance from itself becoming misogynist? Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is a staple example of this not being as clear as its director (and distributors) would necessarily have liked, and it was a question that was on my mind fairly prominently as the events of the film unravelled.
The uncomfortable truth that Birdeater unearthed for me is that the sort of behaviour it depicts from its male characters is behaviour that was and still is intimately familiar to me. Even as the events take a turn to the feral and irredeemable, they are still rooted in behaviours and attitudes that feel ripped straight from my own memories and experiences.
This is where Birdeater separates itself from most contemporary thrillers, and elevates Clark and Weir as a co-directing team to keep a sharp eye on; there is no catharsis or great revelation to be found at Birdeater’s climax. Where a more comfortable or commercial thriller would be intent on wrapping up the conflict in a neat thematic bow that categorises its characters into heroes and villains, Birdeater forces its audience to sit in the uncomfortable reality that it conjures. While the film certainly takes them to an extreme, the manipulation, coercion and gaslighting behaviour on display are nonetheless a shameful, writhing part of male culture in Australia that many would prefer to ignore.
If I were to have a reservation about Birdeater, it is the way that this thematic focus leaves its two main female characters, if anything, slightly undercooked. This is a problem in a film about gender and relationships, although whether this is an intentional reflection of the themes of the film or a blindspot in the script is hard to discern. I particularly wanted to see more of the perspective of Irene, and while she does have one show stopping moment in the pivotal dinner scene, she is largely sidelined in service of the (admittedly riveting) drama between Louie and Dylan.
It is hard to mount this as a criticism towards a film about the sidelining of female agency, but it nonetheless left a knot in my viewing of the film. Whether that particular knot was fashioned by the filmmakers it is almost impossible to tell, and whether that knot contributes to the inherent or implicit message of the film is even harder to tell.
The bottom line is that Birdeater is an incredibly effective thriller with an awesome ensemble cast of relatively unknown Aussie performers, compiled and presented by a filmmaking team that have impressive control over their craft at this early stage in their career. It’s not a film that will hold its audience’s hand, so much as it will wrap a plastic bag around its head, throw it into the back of a ute, and drop them off somewhere in the woods. Birdeater is an acerbic, uncomfortable thriller with more than enough laughs to lower your defences to its ruthless depiction of the type of person we all know. Or, if we’re being honest with ourselves, the sort of person we’re terrified of being seen as.
Birdeater officially opens on Thursday, 18 July.
Jonty Cornford is hosts the Filthy Hope podcast, and writes about film at bluerosefilmreview.blogspot.com