Tags: blog, film, drama, 2025, essential

Author: KickingK

Date: Thursday September 25th, 2025

Yes it really, really, really could 'appen

It's often forgotten, but you have to go through an awful lot of Shawshank before you get to the Redemption. It's A Wonderful Life is mostly a film about a man being driven to suicide. Much of writer/director Andrea Arnold's Bird is similarly difficult to watch. More so as the lead character, Bailey, is a twelve year old girl. Watching her living in such poverty and squalor, lacking any real control over anything in her life is painful. It's heightened, at least for me, by the fact that this is filmed a stones throw¹ from where I live. I know areas like this. I know kids like this.

Writer/director Andrea Arnold manages to make this coming of age tale watchable by crafting something that is supremely beautiful, where hope is everywhere when you look for it. Growing in the cracks in the broken pavement, scrawled on the walls of a piss-stained stairwell, in the scavenging eyes of an urban fox. Even, and I can't believe I'm going to write this, in the lyrics of a Verve record.

Hope is a gradual, building constant in this film. When everything gets too much and threatens to crush and overwhelm Bailey, the film breaks it's own narrative constraints in order to make the point that there's still hope. Still a way for things to be better, still a way to see beauty everywhere.

So when that hope builds to the point of a crashing wave, it hit's like a tidal wave of joy and grief and love.

Out of the movies of the past few years, only Aftersun has had an ending that hit's as hard as this. A masterpiece.

A bloody masterpiece.

Poster Credit Where to Watch

1. Well, a short swim.

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