Birdeater

Birdeater gets off to a slow but promising start. Louie (Mackenzie Fearnley) and Irene (Shabana Azeez) have an unusual relationship. To give more details than that would be to eliminate some of the film’s surprise, so I won’t. Co-writers/co-directors Jack Clark and Jim Weir have a plan for unveiling information as it is most provocative, and I’ll leave it to them to provoke you.

Irene is anxious about the couple’s upcoming wedding. Louis is anxious about Irene’s anxiety about the wedding. So, he invites her along on his “box party” — the Australian term for bachelor party.

What follows is an unrelentingly awkward, fairly twisted tale of sexual politics, blow up dolls, drunkenness, ketamine, big cat tranquilizers, bonfires, and the nature of consent.

It seems important to point out the Wake in Fright movie poster hanging in best man Dylan’s (Ben Hunter) apartment. Like Ted Kotcheff’s unhinged 1971 Outback classic, Birdeater seeks to upset you as it digs into Australian ideas of masculinity. On the whole, it succeeds in that aim—not to the scarring degree of Wake in Fright, but success nonetheless.

Louie’s BFFs Dylan—the boisterous, manly troublemaker—and Charlie (Jack Bannister), the Christian whose brought his also-Christian girlfriend (Clementine Anderson), have plans for the event. But Louie has his own plans and he does not want anything to mess with that.

Birdeater’s greatest success is investment in character. These people feel authentic, which is amazing given their behavior. Their relationships feel truthful and you find yourself invested more in what happens to the side characters than the bride and groom.

Louie’s plans and his mates’ come to a head, which is where Birdeater explodes into messy, fascinating, unrelated pieces. The surface story of bachelor party debauchery—of traditional masculinity run amuck—and the underlying and far more distressing story of male/female relationships sometimes reflect something insightful. Just as often, they feel slapped together nonsensically, or held together with contrived opportunities for exposition.

Recently, Halina Reijn tackled prickly ideas of female sexuality, power, and gender politics with Babygirl. It explored one woman’s seemingly misogynistic choices, but by remaining true to the protagonist’s point of view, the film itself exposes something else.

Birdeater paints itself into a corner it can’t figure out how to escape, primarily because, though the male characters throughout the film wonder at Irene’s choices, the men writing and directing the film don’t seem to understand them. Instead, we spend 90 minutes inside a male perspective as they guess at (and, indeed, create) female motivations. This leads inevitably to a climax that can’t help but be unsatisfying.