Raindance Film Festival review -Broken Beak
When property developer Gregory (Bruce Hopkins) is slaughtered by a figure in a bird costume shortly after signing away a he stretch of the New Zealand coastline for a luxury resort, his estranged adopted Maori lesbian eco-activist art photographer niece Emma (Briar Rose) – who is working on a series of pics of women dressed in bird costumes – finds that she has to spend a month in the dead man’s luxury converted power station in order to inherit the place. Despite having the solid alibi of being in New York for the initial killing, the police seem very keen on pinning several subsequent bird-related murders of her obnoxious cousins on her. And the passed-over housekeeper (Katlyn Wong) who filled her head with stories of an avenging bird spirit called Broken Beak believes that the family has been cursed – though whether the killer is a supernatural avenger or an anti-development activist, it’d probably have suited them better to kill Gregory before he signed off on that big deal.
Written and directed by Christian Carroll, who did a lot of other jobs too, this NZ picture melds giallo-style murder-for-profit, the revenge of aggrieved nature (in the form of birds who were here even before the Maori settled), female-skewing body horror as Emma starts taking on avian characteristics (Rose’s mime is extraordinary) and perhaps a few too many editorial notes about greed, exploitation, climate change (a burning koala clip is shown twice, hashtagged #sosad) and the like. There has always been a seam of green in revolt-of-nature stories, including primal examples like The Birds and Frogs, and you’d be hard-pressed to find sympathetic property developers or lawyers in any giallo. Carroll hints at the backstory which brought Emma into the family in the first place, but leaves that element vague – his protagonist seesaws between likely avenger and probable victim, with a nice line in irony. She embodies all sorts of wokeness – the only two cops on this high-profile case of multiple murders are more leery of her ‘Just Stop Oil’ shirt than the suspect blood smear on her patio doors – but is still tainted by the family guilt.
Carroll uses one key Agatha Christie trick – the publically antagonist characters who are secretly in cahoots – but the mystery angle is almost a feint, resolved fairly early in the proceedings. Then, the film becomes more unconventional – of the various versions of Broken Beak we see (including an animated flashback to the original story), the one which haunts Emma the most is a striking mix of costume, mask and contortionist, as much like a dressed-up witch doctor as an avian mutant (I was slightly reminded of Brewster McCloud). A sub-plot about Emma’s surfer girlfriend (Lydia Peckham) and her mystery man father is salted away early but becomes crucial for the finale. Aka The Burning of Broken Beak.
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