by Mark Demetrius
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Mackenzie Fearnley, Shabana Azeez, Ben Hunter
Intro:
...it’s not breaking any new ground, but it’s suspenseful, effectively disturbing and for the most part, very well acted.
The premise here is simple enough: Australian Louie (Mackenzie Fearnley) and Londoner Irene (Shabana Azeez) are engaged, and happy enough about it – albeit with a hint of uneasiness about some of the detail on her part. He departs from tradition by asking her to come along to his buck’s party, and some of his mates’ girlfriends end up coming too. All the characters appear to be twenty-somethings. Louie is liberal-minded and enlightened, and apparently imbued with the sort of “emotional intelligence” whose absence he deplores in his friend Dylan (Ben Hunter). Dylan is a walking archetype of toxic masculinity, and a tad scary to boot.
The story unfolds in a rural waterside setting, and – you will probably not be surprised to hear – is charged with an ominous atmosphere. Dylan gives a devastating (and apparently truthful) dinner speech … There are stupid boofy ‘games’ involving clobbering and an inflatable sex doll … Everybody drinks too much, and some people take ketamine … And then there is Irene’s ex Sam (Harley Wilson), whose history is ambiguous. It’s all very tense, and convincingly awkward.
Essentially, Birdeater is a slow-burning variant on the tried and true dinner-party-gone-wrong story. This is a psychologically complex story, even though its protagonists are in a primitive situation. There are broad echoes of Wake in Fright – even a sly nod to it via a poster on a wall – and, more directly, of the 1978 Australian short gem The Buck’s Party. As such, it’s not breaking any new ground, but it’s suspenseful, effectively disturbing and for the most part, very well acted.
Worth a look.