In the 2002 horror cult classic May, scream queen Angela Bettis plays a shy veterinarian whose social isolation drives her insane. She’s desperate to connect with the people around her, and fixated on their bodies: her crush’s hands, her co-worker’s neck, a local punk’s arms. As her mental state unravels, she goes on a killing spree and stitches herself a perfect lover — and then begs it over and over to “see” her.
British director Joanne Mitchell's Broken Bird, in select theaters Friday, is part of May’s lineage of lonely-girl Frankensteins — alongside recent riffs on the idea like the Diablo Cody-penned Lisa Frankenstein, from 2024, and Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover, soon to premiere at the Belcourt with an opening set from U.S. Girls. The new generation of these films seems to interrogate the male loneliness epidemic, with shades of the recent cannibal horror romance and “female rage” movie waves: How are women supposed to keep dating when all of the viable men (and sometimes women!) are either taken or dead?
Broken Bird, Mitchell’s full-length directorial debut, is based on her 2018 short film "Sybil", which she also stars in. The short opens on a painstaking close-up makeup routine, the kind that might open up to reveal a woman at a vanity — but it’s revealed that the woman is a corpse who Sybil is giving a final makeover at her mortuary job. Soon she “meets” the disfigured body of Mark, presented with frank, clinical gore, and becomes obsessed with him after stitching him up.
The film will show Monday at the Belcourt, with an opening set from U.S. Girls
The full-length film doesn’t go for shock factor immediately, but it still has a few tricks. Sybil’s future employer, the undertaker Mr. Thomas (James Fleet), first appears lying perfectly still on an embalming table until an alarm goes off and he startles awake. As Sybil (Rebecca Calder) wanders around London, her fantasies bleed into reality like a fucked-up Amélie, a parallel made all the more explicit by a scene in which Calder trims her own blunt bangs in the mirror using embalming supplies (iconic).
Broken Bird expands in part by fleshing out Sybil’s character — she’s given hobbies of taxidermy and poetry, a backstory of a childhood car accident that killed her family, hints of a previous rap sheet of morgues closing in her wake. She also meets Mark (Jay Taylor) while he’s alive, first in the museum where he works and then at a poetry performance. But while the short is a zeroed-in character study on Sybil, the feature-length builds up a supporting cast that includes Emma (Sacharissa Claxton), a cop and grieving mother with a storyline that finds her investigating Sybil, The Ring- or Zodiac-style.
This subplot is confusing and a bit of a tough sell. Though it’s quieter, much more absorbing is Sybil’s relationship with Mr. Thomas, who has his own skeletons in the closet — and how their dynamic reveals the way Sybil’s obsession gets in the way of genuine connection. Toward the film's end, when Sybil turns down his offer to take over the practice and retreats into seclusion, it’s not just a sign of her descent into madness. In a way, it’s more compelling than the film’s final act, in which the reveal is fun to look at but seems more grounded in spectacle than the story itself.
Broken Bird is a slow burn, with some sequences that don’t stick the landing. But its off-kilter storytelling and intriguing considerations of death and loneliness make this promising debut from Mitchell worth the watch.
