Great horror movies and psychological thrillers come on like magic spells, pushing us into incantatory spaces where we kind of want to run for the hills while also knowing we won’t stop watching. Birdeater – a nightmarish Australian film about a buck’s party weekend in the bush that becomes a terrible cocktail of fighting, power plays, verbal grenades and druggy mayhem – exhibits full-on stylistic chutzpah, which I respect in some ways. But this production pushed me away much more than it pulled me in, ultimately leaving me aggrieved, withered and wondering what the point was.
You’re not supposed to enjoy such a rank experience, with its leering characters and thick air of toxic masculinity. But I’ve encountered zoo animals I found more dramatically engaging than some of the people in Birdeater, who range from nakedly feral to complex and troubled. The latter describes Irene (Shabana Azeez), a bride-to-be whose fiance, Louie (Mackenzie Fearnley), invites her along to his buck’s party on a remote property with a bunch of his old mates: Dylan (Ben Hunter), who’s especially wild and ocker, plus Charlie (Jack Bannister), Murph (Alfie Gledhill) and Sam (Harley Wilson). Also in attendance is Charlie’s girlfriend Grace (Clementine Anderson).
For a long time this film is a waiting game, as the characters faff around and co-directors Jack Clark and Jim Weir keep their cards close to their chest, with little to indicate where the story’s headed. You can sense it won’t be a walk in the park but it’s impossible to tell how dark the directors are prepared to go. Much of the anticipation in its first half, in which the characters assemble and the weekend away begins, is the knowledge that the story can’t continue to be so vague and drifting: the film has to start to do something, has to start to be about something.
Cinema has provided many bad wedding-themed speeches that we’ve watched through the slits of our fingers, from Steve Buscemi drunkenly blabbering about rehab and sex workers in The Wedding Singer to Charlotte Rampling’s excruciatingly sour “enjoy it while it lasts” monologue in Melancholia. Birdeater makes a comforting contribution when Dylan, cheeks glowing like hot coals, delivers a speech around the dinner table about 45 minutes in, dredging up ugly things from the past. In this threshold-crossing scene tempers flare and conflict boils over; it felt as though the film-makers were saying: we need some real conflict now.
From the start, the film’s visual rhythms are a little off. Some shots are weirdly framed, off-centre or with an actor’s back facing the camera. Others deliberately displace the viewer by violating the 180 rule. There are wacky zoom-ins and zoom-outs. On some occasions the directors linger for an unusually long time on a closeup; on others, they’ll signpost that something important is about to be said but don’t let us hear it. Ben Anderson’s editing has a scattered, circular momentum, cutting moments short then returning to them unexpectedly. Watching this film is like wearing a new pair of leather boots – you need to break them in before you can appreciate them. For me, these shoes were tough buggers and wouldn’t give.
I found some events in the final act faintly preposterous and the whole thing stretched on for too long, with weird faux endings that felt indecisive. The cast do a pretty good job playing characters who, by design, are mostly unlikable, though none of them are particularly interesting or layered. Having said that, Azeez and Fearnley are unnervingly effective as a couple who feel utterly genuine, even when the film spills over into madness. It’s obviously going for an incantatory atmosphere but the spell didn’t work on me.
Birdeater opens in Australian cinemas on 18 July. The UK release date has yet to be announced
