You always want to start a film festival on a good note, so when I had to choose which FrightFest screener to watch first, it was a no-brainer. Broken Bird wasn’t just one of my most anticipated movies of the entire festival. It was also FrightFest’s opening film, so I figured it had to be good. And you know what? I was right. I walked away from this movie disturbed and unsettled in all the right ways, and I can’t wait to tell you all about it.

Broken Bird was directed by Joanne Mitchell, and it stars Rebecca Calder, James Fleet, Jay Taylor, and Sacharissa Claxton. The film follows Sybil, a lonely mortician whose grip on reality is tenuous at best. She’s desperate to find a friend in this cruel and unforgiving world, but it just never seems to work out.

To compensate, the poor woman hallucinates about connecting with the people she comes across, and as she becomes increasingly disillusioned with her life, she falls deeper and deeper into the recesses of her own sick mind. Sybil soon develops a macabre affinity for the corpses she works with, and she begins to show a troubling antipathy for the living.

For about the first half of its runtime, Broken Bird feels like a slow, meandering crawl without a clear destination, and it can get a bit frustrating. This part of the movie is essentially a character study, and for the longest time, it doesn’t let you know what the story is really about.

You know Sybil is a bit unhinged, but beyond that, it’s tough to see where the narrative is heading. Pretty much the only thing you can latch onto is Sybil herself, and thankfully, she’s totally up to the task. Actress Rebecca Calder is brilliant in the role and pulls off a tough balancing act without breaking a sweat.

Whenever Sybil speaks, she seems like the sweetest person in the world, but she also has the cold, stiff bearing of an upper-class lady who thinks she’s better than everyone else. It’s a bit of an odd combination, but it fits the character perfectly. You can tell she wants to be nice and make friends, but she doesn’t have the social skills to make it happen.

That great lead performance almost single-handedly carries Broken Bird till around the halfway point, so even though I eventually became a bit annoyed by the film’s lack of narrative urgency, my attachment to the main character kept me on board until the story picked up the pace.

And when that happened, it was all smooth sailing until the credits began to roll. I can’t get into specifics without spoiling the movie’s surprises, but I can say that there’s a clear turning point that accelerates Sybil’s mental breakdown, causing the woman’s affinity for the dead to become genuinely disturbing.

She begins to treat the cadavers in her morgue like real people, and she takes this delusion further than you might expect. Most notably, there’s a scene where she thinks one of the corpses is being a jerk to her, and her response literally made me let out a soft “Nooooooooo.” It’s pretty disgusting, and the fact that it’s a dead body rather than a living person gives the scene a uniquely unnerving quality that’s different from your typical genre fare. 

From there, Broken Bird is pretty much all about Sybil’s gradual descent into madness, and as the poor woman’s grip on reality becomes looser and looser, her actions become more and more unsettling. It all comes to a head in a truly horrifying finale that just might end up living rent-free in your nightmares, but it’s not a stereotypical horror ending.

Somewhat surprisingly, the film never takes a turn into all-out gore or nonstop jump scares, and to be frank, it doesn’t need to. The disturbing imagery and the sheer horror of what’s going on are more than enough to end the experience on a high note (or a low note, if you’re looking at it from Sybil’s perspective), but in case you still want more, there’s also a tragic hint of sympathy to make this chaos even more harrowing.

Again, I don’t want to spoil anything, but I can say that you’ll genuinely feel sorry for this poor woman, and it’s not just because she’s lonely. Her single-minded obsession with the dead blinds her to the possibilities of living a happy life with the people around her, and her final scene is the utterly heartbreaking cherry on top of it all.

In case you couldn’t tell, I had a great time with Broken Bird. While I had some issues with the first half, they weren’t nearly enough to ruin the entire movie. Once I saw how the narrative came together in the last act, some of those problems vanished. The good in this film ended up outweighing the bad by a pretty wide margin.

In particular, Rebecca Calder’s performance as Sybil is almost worth the price of admission, and the character’s tragic story is equal parts heartbreaking and horrific. I totally understand why FrightFest’s organizers chose to open the festival with this movie, and if you get a chance to see it sometime in the future, I highly recommend that you give it a watch.