Broken Bird
Mister Thomas soon to retire, feeling the burden of the work since the death of his wife, he needs an assistant who will perhaps take over the day to day running of the business, Sybil Chamberlain already experienced in the duties and practices of the mortician having worked in a funeral home before, and with no family or connections she can devote herself to the work, a slightly eccentric loner but one whose propriety cannot be faulted.
A broken police officer, Emma is drinking and hiding her pills from her colleagues, trying to get through each day, calling her ex even though she has been told that she mustn’t contact him, desperately needing answers one way or another, anything to give her closure, her superiors sympathetic but unable to provide answers to a case involving one of their own, Emma’s son missing for three months with no leads.
Broken Bird directed by Joanne Mitchell from a script by Dominic Brunt, expanded from Mitchell’s earlier short Sybil co-written with Tracey Sheals, Eight for Silver’s Rebecca Calder is Sybil Chamberlain, a woman who has surrounded herself with death since childhood, the only survivor when her family were killed in a road accident, now moving from mortuary to mortuary seeking a place to belong, collecting roadkill to turn it into taxidermy, the dead the only things which can be counted on not to betray her.
Always on the outside looking in, her life a fantasy of filling in the gaps of possibility, of projecting her hopes onto strangers, she becomes obsessed with museum worker Mark (Jay Taylor), reacting with furious jealousy when she realises that he has a fiancé (Robyn McHarry), the unreciprocated emotion invested in a lost cause prompting an unpremeditated action which tips her already precarious mental equilibrium.
Woven into Sybil’s story is that of Emma (Sacharissa Claxton), tormented by grief and questions and warned off from making attempts to investigate her own case but piecing together clues in her mind, the trail inevitably leading her to the house of death with its clean reception rooms of polished wood and the immaculate basement of pumps and drains, the secrets of the grave guarded by Sybil.
Built around Calder’s mesmerising performance as Sybil, as hard, sharp and brittle as flint, Broken Bird is an elegy to overwhelming loss and loneliness, Sybil a woman locked in the fantasies of her mind, a star seeking a spotlight, always playing to an absent audience and raging when reality intrudes, the logistics of the film not always standing up to scrutiny and ending in frustratingly obvious flames, as do most tales of madness, but immaculate in its presentation it is a thing of twisted beauty, albeit one brimming with salty tears.
Broken Bird was screened at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest and is released on Friday 30th August
