circleThere's something about Sybil (Rebecca Calder) that's too conventional, with her neat demeanor, midcentury chic and 180-degree ramparts of fringe. But her politeness helps her land a job at Mr. Thomas' (James Fleet) funeral parlor. Like Amelie Poulain's twisted sister, Sybil is prone to fantasies, including an affair with museum curator Mark (Jay Taylor) whom she bumps into at an exhibition on Roman burials, and ambushes the corpse of her lover. But as she confesses to Mr. Thomas, there's a reason for her pathological nature and need for control: she was orphaned in a car accident as a child.
An extension of Joan Mitchell’s 2018 short film, Broken Bird, has not only the detail and richness of a long-gestating project, but also a careful tonal line that operates in the waiting room between psychological thriller and true horror. What begins as an uneasy whimsy, with Sybil passive-aggressively crunching chips during someone else’s poetry reading, quickly rockets into a cacophonous drumbeat as her infatuation with Mark grows. She’s engrossed in sappy love fantasies, and back on Earth, tensions bubble up as she hurls abuse at local skaters.
This psychological play is so compelling that it makes the rest of the film seem like a supporting role. In the first half, “Broken Bird” alternates between a quirky storyline involving Sybil and Emma (Sakarisa Claxton), a police officer grieving the disappearance of her young son. Unlike his protagonist's dealings with a dead body, Mitchell fails to deftly tie it into the main storyline, nor does he breathe enough life into another spinoff storyline involving what Mr. Thomas is hiding behind a locked door.
But that doesn't detract from the main show, which would be inconceivable without Calder's natural flexibility. She plays both talkative (to the bodies) and aloof (to her clients), eccentric and eerie, determined and disordered, with ease, finding a strange serenity at the heart of a swirling Gothic madness that somehow gets her characters on her side. With a precise yet ironic sense that death looms over us all, this is a promising and exciting debut from Mitchell.
