BWith her stuffy manners, mid-century chic and 180-degree bangs, there’s something too proper about Sybil (Rebecca Calder), but it’s precisely this propriety that gets her a job at Mr. Thomas’s (James Fleet) funeral parlor. Like Amélie Poulain’s crazy little sister, she’s prone to outbursts of fantasy: about a tryst with museum curator Mark (Jay Taylor), whom she meets at an exhibition on Roman burials, or about a sly blow to the corpse of an adulterer. But as she reveals to Mr. Thomas, her morbidity and obsession with control have an explanation: she was orphaned as a child in a car accident.
A sequel to director Joanne Mitchell’s 2018 short film, Broken Bird not only has the detail and richness of a long-gestating project, but also follows a careful tone line that operates in the waiting room between psychological thriller and genuine horror. The uneasy mood of the opening, in which Sybil passive-aggressively munches on chips while other people give poetry recitals, quickly escalates into a drumbeat of dissonance as her infatuation with Mark grows. Her sugary dreams of love envelop her, while on planet Earth, tension is evident, as when she berates the local skaters.
This psychological accompaniment is so compelling that it makes the other parts of the film seem secondary. In the first half of Broken Bird, Sybil alternates with an offbeat storyline about Emma (Sacharissa Claxton), a police officer grieving the disappearance of her young son. Mitchell fails to tie the plot to the main story as artfully as her protagonist does to the bodies – nor does she breathe full life into another subplot about what Mr. Thomas is hiding behind his locked door.
But it doesn’t detract from the main show, which would be unthinkable without the effortlessly lithe Calder. She confidently straddles the loquacious (to the corpses) and terse (to the customers), quirky and creepy, determined and chaotic, somehow finding a strange serenity at the heart of the spiraling gothic madness that keeps the character on her side. With an unerring but sarcastic sense of how death besets us all, this is a promisingly sharp-tongued debut from Mitchell.
