Calgary Underground 2025 Review: BROKEN BIRD, A Beautiful And Muddled Provocation

We meet Sybil confidently applying for a new job as undertaker’s assistant with the sharpest of black bangs, and a fashion sense that is both vintage and arthouse-modern. She is a seasoned pro with several references, and a balm for the owner who just lost his wife and was on the cusp of selling the funeral home and retiring, before death kept him working.

A goth in the park with AirPods, Joanna Mitchells’ debut feature Broken Bird is, as the small funeral parlour is described at one point in the film, boutique. Nestled somewhere between Lucky McKee’s May and Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed, it is a very specific kind of psychological character study - one revolving around a traumatized/empowered female, both oddly relatable, and romantically opaque.

All is not quite right with Sybil though, who regularly walks the local park with an empty stroller pretending to be one of the local moms. She gathers roadkill for her taxidermy hobby, and moonlights at the local coffee-house as a breathy poet, while during the day she stands silently, judging grieving widows. She often gets lost in the fantasy of how she would like the world to react to her, rather than how it more or less indifferent to her desires.

Take the attractive and sensitive guy who works at the local museum. There is not one, but two meet-cutes between them. Are they her projections, or are they real? There is a kind of whiplash between the grounded and the heightened at play here. This accelerates as Broken Bird reveals itself.

Meanwhile, there is an unrelated police woman, Emma, grieving with the bottle, mourning the loss of her child. Emma also struggles with fantasy and reality, reliving decisions she made around her divorce, and her son, prior to his odd disappearance. The police station and Emma's life is shot in deep, cold blue.

In contrast, Sybil’s existence is in glowing golden-hued honey. The dance of these two colour palettes is one of the chief delights here. Not since Denis Villeneuve's Sicario have the dance of these two hues been the Rosetta Stone for character, circumstance, and contrivance. It is gorgeously shot, with meticulous production design across its varied locations, a modern glass and steel police station, as well as the cozy mahogany-panelled funeral parlour, a misty urban park, and eventually, an ivy-crusted cathedral straight out of a gothic romance.

The narrative unfolds like a gothic romance in reverse. Where the lead has all the answers, and pulls the strings behind the curtain. It is for us, not Sybil, to discover the keys and the secret passages. How the film eventually connects these two very different storylines is both inevitable and, bluntly, a bit bonkers, due to things hinging on the most mundane, and insignificant of coincidences.

Broken Bird is equal parts psychological mystery, romance, and cool examination of taboos around love and death, that, when all combined, feels like a provocation. Regardless of your age or experience, this movie is unabashedly aiming to shove its audience out of their genre-comfort zone. It does occasionally buckle and wobble under first feature over-stuffing, however, this is more than made up for with handsome visual preciseness, and a quirky central performance from Rebecca Calder. Watching her cut an errant hair from her glorious bangs with sharp scissors has an ASMR tactility that the camera absolutely revels in.

There is bound to be a tiny niche of the film's viewership, which is already a tiny niche (a niche of a niche) that choose Broken Bird to be their favourite film of all time. It is boutique.

The film enjoys its North American premiere at the Calgary Underground Film Festival.