Brooklyn Horror Film Fest 2024: Birdeater

Smart, wickedly funny, and sinister, “Birdeater” is a chilling study of toxic masculinity that’s as entertaining as it is unnerving.

The bleakness and eerie beauty of the Australian Outback has provided a backdrop for many horror films, including classics like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Wake in Fright (1971). Now, Jack Clark and Jim Weir have teamed up as writers/directors on the social thriller Birdeater (2023), which celebrated its East Coast premiere at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival on October 18.

Meet Louie (Mackenzie Fearnley) and Irene (Shabana Azeez), a young engaged couple. Before the credits even roll, these two seem… off. From the montage of their days together, Irene rarely leaves their apartment and falls asleep so easily that she appears to have narcolepsy. Louie is more her caretaker than her fiancé: He repeatedly encourages her to take mysterious medication every day and carries her to their couch after she passes out.

Louie also lies to Irene over and over, telling her he needs to meet up with his father or work when instead he’s golfing by himself or getting stoned with his friends (one of whom has a Wake in Fright poster in his home, providing foreshadowing for the debauchery ahead).

As Irene begs him to stay with her at their apartment only for him to leave, it’s impossible to think theirs is a healthy relationship. When they try to plan their wedding, Irene becomes easily overwhelmed as Louie cringingly suggests doing the seating chart “girl-boy-girl-boy.”

Even stranger, Louie invites Irene to his buck’s night (bachelor party) in the Outback, along with his three best friends, one of their wives, and one of Irene’s male friends.

As they gather, Louie’s resistance to participating in some of the “traditional” bachelor activities (including binge drinking) creates friction in his core group of friends. His goofiest friend Dylan (played by scene-stealer Ben Hunter, who does rough-and-tumble as well as he does vulnerable) demands Louie go wild, telling him that during buck’s night, “The boys own you.”

Birdeater is a blend of humor, horror, and inescapable heteronormativity.

Despite his reluctance, Louie allows his pals to pressure him into a revealing one-piece black bathing suit; he looks ridiculous for most of the film. On the other hand, Irene is elegant in a gorgeous white dress, which she covers with a white sweater or a long white parka.

As Birdeater heavily relies on the tension between Irene and Louie—and between women and men as a whole—this sartorial contrast is just one of the clever touches Clark and Weir include in the film.

It is one of the funniest horror films in recent history, with jokes about everything from the Bechdel test to absurd drinking games like Squealies. (Spoiler alert: It involves squealing.) The humor provides a sharp contrast to the darkness that stems from a. dangerous “boys will be boys” attitude that infests the minds of everyone at Buck’s Night.

The terror comes from human nature and toxic masculinity instead of something supernatural or gory.

In the house where the group is staying, the two women often lock themselves in the bathroom for brief moments of respite. They both notice a lighter oval area on the wall above the sink, indicating that the bathroom mirror has been removed. This weekend, the women are defined by their relationships with men; they don’t even have reflections to tie them back to their true selves.

One of the film’s most nightmarish sequences (which also combines humor and horror) involves a sex worker named Lady Lazurus, who rises out of nowhere in the Outback to celebrate Louie’s last days as a single man.

Perhaps a nod to the iconic Sylvia Plath poem “Lady Lazarus,” the film’s Lady Lazurus hypnotizes the men with a seductive dance that’s at odds with the big smile on her face. Plath’s poem tells the story of a woman whose attempts at death are thwarted; she always comes back “to the same place, the same face, the same brute.”

Are the women in Birdeater doomed to continue facing their brutes, no matter how much they may want to escape?