It’s funny, even touching, and altogether credible in the kinetic flow of writer-director Andrea Arnold’s scrappy drama. There is a logic to the amphibian serenade: Bug (Barry Keoghan) needs the creature to excrete its hallucinogenic slime,

With Bird, the English kitchen-sink realist makes a daring move toward the surreal in her first narrative feature in eight years.

Coming off of her 2021 documentary Cow, about the rhythms and regimens of a dairy cow in Kent, English filmmaker Andrea Arnold returns with Bird (2024), a strange but affable fairy tale about coming of age under precarious circumstances.