Birdeater (2024) Review: A Bleak, Though Meandering Contemporary Take on Wake in Fright-Style Drama

At one point in a blink-and-you-miss-it glimpse of a Wake in Fright poster on the wall in Birdeater, it’s clear that Jack Clark and Jim Weir want to delve their debut feature into that Ted Kotcheff’s seminal 1971 Australian New Wave drama’s similarly thematic exploration of toxic masculinity and moral regression.

But instead of a disillusioned nowhere-town schoolteacher, Birdeater follows a young couple Louie (Mackenzie Fearnley) and Irene (Shabana Azeez) who fall in love at first sight after they lay eyes on each other on a Sydney beach. They eventually got engaged but there’s something odd about their relationship.

Despite their physical affection, there’s a distant sense of coldness between the two of them. And the movie reflects its frigidity through the co-directors’ subtle mix of suggestive and minimalistic imagery and Roger Stonehouse’s atmospheric cinematography. We see Irene has been taking a sedative and lying on the bed each time Louie departs their seemingly lifeless apartment. We also learn that Irene suffers from separation anxiety because of it and Louie would come up with whatever excuses to go out, leaving her significant other waiting at home.

This goes on and on until one day, Louie decides to invite Irene to join him for a bucks party (an Australian term for “stag party”) and meet his friends. This includes Murph (Alfie Gledhill), Dylan (Ben Hunter) and Charlie (Jack Bannister) along with the latter’s fiancé Grace (Clementine Anderson), the only other girl besides Irene.

The first half of the movie can be frustrating at times since Clark and Weir take their sweet time getting to the point of their storytelling. They favour a slow-burn narrative approach, which is fine by me as long as the story manages to keep me hooked. And yet, I can’t help but feel the annoyingly enigmatic nature of these characters’ motivations, particularly their eventual weekend bucks party gathering in a remote location.

I understand a less-is-more storytelling and the power of suggestion can yield a sense of unease, which I admit does work to a certain extent. But at the same time, it’s a test of patience watching the movie unfold in a repetitive moment of drinking, swearing and whatnot, which reminds me of the rinse-and-repeat storytelling seen in Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice.

But like the latter, Birdeater finally picks up the pace in the second half once they gather for dinner and that’s where things start to get uncomfortable. Clark and Weir continue to pay homage to Wake in Fright, notably the coin toss scene except this one takes place on the night of the bonfire. Then comes the psychedelic visuals that mirror the characters’ Ketamine-influenced, drugged-out state as the night grows increasingly wild — disorienting camera angles, warped sound design, saxophone-heavy crescendos and hard-hitting match cuts, to name a few.

Secrets are subsequently revealed like how Louie got that prominent, thick scar around the side of his head in the first place. It was purposefully executed to make it like we are in the part of one’s jumbled-up, fragmented and at times, vague memories between the past and present and how everything is related to each other.

No doubt Clark and Weir, who previously cut their teeth on directing shorts, an anthological miniseries (No Burn Day) and Dro Carey’s music video, well how to pull off a visually stimulating movie with their clever use of sound, colour and framing, proving their technical prowess. The young cast deserves equal praise, beginning with Mackenzie Fearnley who excels the most as the control freak, Louie. Shabana Azeez, in the meantime, delivers a sympathetic turn as Louie’s fiancé, Irene. As for the supporting roles, Ben Hunter impresses in his crazy and volatile role as Dylan.