Broken Bird opens with the image of, precisely, a dead bird lying supine in the foreground, only to be picked up by the hands of a blurry figure. Sybil Chamberlain (Rebecca Calder, superbly fey) is not intending to throw her discovery away, but rather suits up in surgical scrubs, glove and mask, and cuts open the dead creature before stitching it up again – like Mary does to the turkey at the beginning of Jen and Sylvia Soska’s American Mary (2012). For besides writing poetry that she performs on the open mic circuit, Sybil’s other hobby is amateur taxidermy, which complements her professional life as a mortician. Indeed she often brings her work home with her, picking up random road kill to be preserved later.
In fact road kill forms the primal scene of this obviously odd woman, who as a child many years earlier was in a car accident that left her alone alive and trapped for days in a car with the corpses of her parents and siblings. It is the kind of ordeal that leaves lasting trauma, and now Sybil dresses herself in formal clothing from long-past decades, talks to the cadavers which she makes presentable and surrounds herself with the dead, while residing in a vivid fantasy world even when among the living. Only her (unseen) young son keeps her tethered to any kind of reality, even as she longs for romance with Mark (Jay Taylor), who she briefly met when he was working at a museum exhibition on Roman funerals. Already in a loving relationship with Tina (Robyn McHarry), Mark is utterly unobtainable, but a girl can dream – and eventually another car accident will bring all of Sybil’s interests and erotic obsessions to the mortuary slab, and lead to the total unravelling of herself and others.
If Sybil is a study of unresolved grief, then other characters in Broken Bird come with their own stories of loss to offset Sybil’s. Divorced police detective Emma (Sacharissa Claxton) has still not recovered from both the death of her young son Jake (Aleksa Muždeka) three months earlier, and the bizarre disappearance of his body from the funeral home – and is now herself lost to drink and deluded visions of Jake as though he were still living with her. Meanwhile, recently bereaved old Mr Thomas (James Fleet), the latest in a long line of Sybil’s employers, cannot quite let go of the late wife with whom he ran his funeral business for decades.
With Broken Bird, Joanne Mitchell expands her short film Sybil (2018), which she co-wrote with Tracey Sheals, into her debut feature as director, with a screenplay now written by Dominic Blunt (who also cameos as a rival poet). It is evident from early on just how the stories of Sybil and Emma – the film’s two ‘broken birds’ – are destined to dovetail together, but then this is less twisty thriller than intense psychodrama. So, even as the parallel paths being trodden by its different characters show a mosaic of mourning, madness and mortality, Mitchell can in fact exploit the viewer’s knowledge of where things are headed to show only what she has to, and to elide the unspeakable. For this illicit coupling of Lucky McKee’s May (2002) and Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed (1996) may ultimately be a horrific undertaking, but it also finds, as Thomas Lynch might appreciate, the poetic (yet perverse) sweet spot between life, love and loss – and its ending, for all its unhinged deviancy, is undeniably tragic.
Broken Bird had its world première opening FrightFest 2024, 22 August. It will be released on 30 August.
