Opening this year’s FRIGHTFEST is the gothic shocker Broken Bird, the directorial feature debut of actress Joanne Mitchell, adapted from her and Tracey Sheals’ award winning short Sybil from 2018. Starring Rebecca Calder as Sybil Carmichael, an eccentric mortician, the film explores themes of loneliness and society’s attitude and handling of death.
After suffering from a life shattering tragedy at just ten years old, Sybil Carmichael has carved an independent life for herself, indulging in her hobbies of taxidermy and poetry, as well as enjoying her job as an assistant mortician at the funeral home of the local funeral director (James Fleet). Sybil however, has a certain affinity and deep love for the company she prefers to keep – that of the dead. After a chance encounter, Sybil falls desperately in love, but a sequence of events leads her affection for the cadavers at work to plunge into unthinkable depths. Perpendicular to Sybil’s narration is that of a mother (Sacharissa Claxton) who has recently lost her child, who has driven herself to the brink of insanity in order to discover the answers to his disappearance.
Based on broken bird syndrome not just in namesake but in theory, Broken Bird explores how a deeply traumatised soul seeks out people she thinks need fixing (ie) because they’re dead. Rebecca Calder plays Sybil not that much unlike a manic pixie dream girl, kooky and whimsical, which is in stark contrast to the actions she undertakes during the film’s progression. Where Sybil’s narration is flighty, darkly eccentric, and in the realms of fantasy, the storyline of grieving mother {insert name here} is what anchors the film firmly in reality, reminding us that there are serious repercussions to the actions undertaken by Sybil.
Illustrating the lengths to which individuals go when experiencing intense and inconsolable loneliness, Broken Bird softly caresses some taboo subjects, whilst also exploring how a western society deals –or doesn’t deal– with the reality of grief and death. It is also an unravelling of a deeply disturbed mind, Broken Bird is the love child of Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Amélie Poulain from Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001).
5 Screams out of 5.
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