Barry Keoghan plays man-child with 3 kids in social drama Bird

The actor is a single dad about to wed a woman he has known for three months. Not everyone is happy about the news in this tender film with laugh-out-loud moments.

Barry Keoghan in Bird.

Animals are central to the British social drama Bird. They appear literally, metaphorically and fantastically in the lives of the down-at-heel but not down-at-heart people at the centre of this moving coming-of-age story.

There are inquisitive birds, dignified horses, a pet dog, butterflies trapped behind window panes, a comical “drug toad” and the insects tattooed all over Bug (Irish actor Barry Keoghan), a man-child who has three children and is about to wed a woman he has known for three months.

The nuptial news upsets his 12-year-old daughter Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams in a stunning performance). She has an older half-brother and a toddler half-sister. They live in a dilapidated squat in North Kent, where the writer-director Andrea Arnold grew up.

Bailey disses her father, goes for a walk and meets an unusual stranger (German actor Franz Rogowski). He has a hare lip, speaks in an odd accent and wears a kilt. He tells her his name is Bird.

She is suspicious at first but comes to like this poetic free spirit, who claims he used to live in the area and is searching for his lost parents. He is childlike and birdlike.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it,’’ he tells her. “What is?” she asks. “The day,’’ he replies.

He’s not an actual bird … or is he? This film is an interesting shift for the director in that it adds magical realism to the social realism that underpins previous works such as Fish Tank (2009) and American Honey (2016).

Bailey is the heart of the story. She’s a child who has had to grow up far too fast and is now on the cusp of adulthood and womanhood (there is a touching scene when she has her first period).

Her mother has three other daughters, all younger than Bailey, and is in a relationship with a violent man. It seems destined that Bird will come into this household too.

Is he Bailey’s human guardian angel, a figment of her imagination due to traumatic disassociation, or a literal bird? This question comes to a head in an extraordinary scene at her mother’s house. Viewers will make up their own minds as to who or what Bird is. There’s lots of room to think about it.

There are laugh-out-loud comic moments, including the toad that Bug thinks will finance the wedding by secreting a hallucinogenic slime that can be sold on the street. To ooze the slime it needs to hear a “bad” song. The director playfully chooses Murder on the Dancefloor, which a naked Keoghan dances to in Emerald Fennell’s 2023 black comedy Saltburn.

While social and economic disadvantage is central to this story, it is not what drives the characters. Aside from the violent boyfriend, they are not “bad” people. Nor do they consider themselves victims. They live with love in semi-squalor.

The animals often appear incidentally, on the edge of our vision. The director is asking us to pause for a moment and consider other lives. I think she has the same intention with Bird, Bailey and her far-from-nuclear family. I left this film feeling far more optimistic than I expected I would.

Bird (MA15+)

117 minutes

In cinemas

★★★½