Directed by Joanne Mitchell – from a script she co-wrote with Dominic Brunt and Tracey Sheals – this set-in-Yorkshire, shot-in-Serbia exercise in poetic necro-romanticism is built around strong performances from Rebecca Calder and Sacharissa Claxton as women who have been greatly affected by a recent tragedy involving the death or disappearance (or death and disappearance) of a child and are coping or not coping in very different ways. Emma (Claxton), a bereft mother, hits the booze, drunk-calls her ex and isn’t doing well at her job – which happens to be with the police who are investigating the case – while Sybil (Calder), an assistant undertaker, reads her enigmatic poems at open-mike nights in a local pub, imagines a relationship with a museum worker (Jay Taylor), adopts an exaggerated silent movie star look (she sometimes resembles Zombie Amélie) and wonders what her new boss (James Fleet) is keeping in the supposedly out of use locked cold room in the funeral parlour where she’s the only employee.
Broken Bird doles out its plot – both backstory and forward momentum – in birdlike little bites, though audiences are quite likely to fill in some (but not all) of the mosaic before the film pulls back to show the whole picture (which evokes Edgar Allan Poe in several key ways). Calder is an extraordinary presence and brings a lot to the generally calm-seeming, deeply disturbed central character – Sybil is the sort who brings Yorkshire tea and battenberg cake to bear when threatening or duping someone who’s got in the way … and Mitchell doesn’t shy away from grand guignol business in the morgue as Sybil pays loving or violent attentions to corpse men who don’t disappoint her the way real people do after her fantasies of romance or revenge have quietly evaporated.