Broken Bird review – creepily brilliant psych-horror of control-freak funeral-parlour attendant

With her prim manners, mid-century chic and 180-degree rampart of a fringe, there’s something just too correct about Sybil (Rebecca Calder), though it’s this decorum that wins her a job at the funeral home of Mr Thomas (James Fleet). Like Amélie Poulain’s twisted little sister, she’s given to eruptions of fantasy: about a tryst with museum curator Mark (Jay Taylor), whom she runs into at an exhibition about Roman burials, or about sucker-punching an adulterer’s corpse. But, as she reveals to Mr Thomas, the morbidness and control-freakery have an explanation: she was orphaned as a child as a result of a car crash.

An extension of director Joanne Mitchell’s 2018 short, Broken Bird has not only the detail and richness of a long-cherished project, but also patrols a careful tonal line that operates in the waiting room between psychological thriller and true horror. The uneasy whimsy of the opening, with Sybil passively-aggressively crunching crisps during other people’s poetry recitals, quickly steepens to a drumbeat of dissonance as her infatuation with Mark grows. Her syrupy love reveries envelop her, while back on planet Earth the strain is showing, as when she screams abuse at the local skaters.

This psychological accompaniment is so persuasive that it makes the other parts of the film look secondary. In its first half, Broken Bird alternates Sybil with an out-on-a-limb plotline about Emma (Sacharissa Claxton), a police officer grieving the disappearance of her young son. Mitchell doesn’t manage to sew it up with the main plotline as artfully as her protagonist does with the cadavers – nor breathe full life into another offshoot involving what Mr Thomas keeps behind his locked door.

But it doesn’t detract from the main show, which is unthinkable without the effortlessly supple Calder. She confidently straddles garrulous (to the corpses) and terse (to the clients), quirky and creepy, resolute and shambolic, and somehow finds a strange serenity at the heart of spiralling gothic madness that keeps the character on-side. With an unerring but sardonic sense of how death presses in on us all, this is a promisingly pungent debut from Mitchell.

• Broken Bird is in UK cinemas from 30 August.