Grief is the spectre that haunts Andrea Arnold’s work like Catherine Earnshaw fated to forever roam the Yorkshire moors. Hauntings keep the past alive; this is not mere nostalgia, but a conscious carrying of the past with us into the present, for better or for worse. In Red Road, the devastated Jackie, still seeking justice for the death of her husband and daughter, is driven to make a heinous false accusation against their killer. Star, the teenage girl at the heart of American Honey, flees a life of poverty and abuse, only to find herself in a romance with an unstable drifter. Even Cow, Arnold’s 2021 documentary about the depressing daily life of a dairy cow named Luma, plays out with the same sadness, as we see Luma’s calf being taken away from her shortly after birth, and are confronted with the short, sharp shock of Luma’s death when she ceases to become profitable as an asset.

Continuing the animal theme that began with her short films Dog and Wasp and continued into features with Fish Tank, her sixth feature Bird is a continuation of ideas that have endured across her 23-year career. As in all her films, the lead is a young woman with a turbulent home life – 12-year-old Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams), who roams the vicinity of her squat with a sullen scowl and a jutted jaw, like she’s itching for a fight. Who can blame her?

There is harshness always lingering in the periphery, notably in the form of her absent mother’s violent boyfriend Skate (James Nelson-Joyce) and her charismatic but volatile father Bug (Barry Keoghan, covered in a biosphere’s worth of insect tattoos), but also in the gang her half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda) is a member of, who enact vigilante justice on locals they have deemed in need of a duffing up. Bailey, on the cusp of teendom, shows signs of internalising this, pestering Hunter to join his gang, and reacting with (admittedly justified) hostility when Bug announces he’s marrying his girlfriend of three months at the weekend.

Exhausted and angry, Bailey flees into the estuary fields, where she meets a strange man who introduces himself as Bird (Franz Rogowski, with his soft, lilting German accent and wide, bright eyes, imbued with a grace Bailey has not encountered much). She reacts – as any street-smart kid would – with suspicion, immediately whipping out her phone to film him and threatening to get her brother to beat him up if he “tries anything”. Bird, unconcerned, performs a small dance. He explains he’s looking for his people, and Bailey reluctantly gives him directions to the address scribbled on the back of a cigarette packet. Before he leaves, Bird looks up at the sunrise for a long moment. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ he remarks to Bailey. “What is?’’ she grouses, having had enough of this weirdo. He smiles gently. “The day.”

Despite her hostility (forged by a world which hasn’t given her much to be optimistic about so far), Bailey can’t shake a lingering curiosity about the odd Bird, and after covertly following him for a bit, she offers – again couched in a sort of reluctance – to help him find his family, despite, or perhaps owing to, the possible implosion of her own. Bird’s plight offers not only a distraction for Bailey but also a glimpse of kinship.

Bird, who takes all Bailey’s barbs on the chin, is more maternal than paternal, earnestly telling Bailey she’s beautiful after she denigrates her appearance (both her parents call her ugly after she shaves her hair in a fit of pre-teen rebellion) and proving a pro with her younger siblings on a day trip to the beach. It’s at the seaside that Bailey wades out into the gentle tide and floats on her back – a scene that mirrors the end of American Honey.

In both instances, Arnold communicates a sense of peace that comes from nature, but also the idea of a rebirth. For Star, the realisation has finally come that she can live life on her own terms, but for Bailey, it’s an indication of how comfortable she has become. For one brief moment, she’s a kid again, floating on her back, looking up at the sky, not burdened by her father’s madcap moneymaking ventures involving hallucinogenic toads, or her mother’s clearly abusive relationship and the threat that poses to her little sisters and brother

Perhaps unexpectedly, Bird calls to mind Spielberg’s seminal sci-fi E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, in which another child forms a friendship with a mysterious visitor looking for a home (Bird and Bailey, E.T. and Elliott). While Bird skews more “magical realism” than outright fantasy, it possesses the same self-serious young protagonist, dogged by a grief they are too young to formally articulate or process. Similarly, as Spielberg’s film was praised for its darker take on American suburbia, Arnold subverts the idea of the working-class estates of North Kent as pervasively grim.

The squat in which Bailey lives is run-down, but characterised by its sunlight and the personalised marks that make it home. Children laugh and shout and play in the streets. Over the credits, the cast, crew and locals lip-sync to Fontaines D.C.’s “Too Real” which is used in the film. This is no kitchen sink drama; those most marginalised by years of British austerity are making do, and they’re as entitled to magic as the rest.

Bailey’s feelings of rejection have led her to reject the world back in turn, but the arrival of Bird – and the slow unfurling of his own isolation – starts to change her perspective. Crucially, it isn’t one grand gesture that does it, but instead a patchwork of moments, not all of which come from Bird himself. The flawed parental figures of Bird are not monsters, but rather hopelessly human, able to grow and change along with Bailey herself, they in turn fucked up by circumstance. So there is grief here, yes, in the overcast skies and pavement cracks. It lingers for what was lost and what was never allowed to begin with. But a haunting doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Perhaps it can be a reminder that we’re never truly alone, even when we feel it the most.

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