For those with a taste for the macabre, the indie horror offering Broken Bird is about to become your latest obsession. This long-gestating labor of love from veteran horror storyteller Joanne Mitchell celebrates its World Premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square in London, and opens this year’s Pigeon Shrine FrightFest, before being loosed upon UK cinemas on August 30th, 2024.
Mitchell has spent nearly 15 years honing her craft, allowing this rich, disturbing gothic tale to fully gestate into what promises to be her masterful feature directorial debut. It’s an adaptation of her 2018 award-winning short Sybil (co-written with Tracey Sheals), now expanded into a full-length descent into obsession, death, and the darkest recesses of a uniquely unhinged mind.
At the grotesquely beating heart of Broken Bird lies Sybil Chamberlain, an unsettlingly quirky loner brilliantly portrayed with eerie nuance by Rebecca Calder. On the surface, Sybil is a quiet creative soul who fills her days crafting macabre poetry and practicing the art of taxidermy. Her place of employment fittingly surrounds her with the cold, deadened company she adores – the local funeral parlor.
You see, Sybil prefers dead people. They understand her obsessive fascination in ways the living simply cannot. Her aching loneliness first took root after a tragic accident at age 10 stole away her beloved family. The void that remained behind allowed her vivid imagination and love of poetry to become an escape…but also a slippery slope as her “dark desires” steadily consumed her already tenuous grasp on reality.
Reality and fantasy merge in increasingly disturbing ways as Sybil’s fascination with death takes an unsettlingly strange twist. Building towards a horrific, Gothic-laced climax, Broken Bird ultimately finds its protagonist achieving her own macabre version of happiness and contentment – with the dead people she’s kept as eternally captive companions.
Calder’s chilling performance as the unhinged Sybil is accompanied by an ensemble of exceptional talent, including James Fleet (Four Weddings & a Funeral), Sacharissa Claxton (Avenue 5), and Jay Taylor (Misfits).
With its rich exploration of obsession, death, mental fragility, and the depraved corners of the human psyche, Broken Bird carries all the deranged hallmarks of a new cult horror classic. Keep your eyes peeled (and perhaps one covered) as this long-incubating labor of love prepares to take its first haunting flight at FrightFest before descending upon UK cinemas on August 30th.
Check out the trailer for Broken Bird Below:
About FrightFest
Dubbed “the Woodstock of Gore” by director Guillermo Del Toro, FrightFest, set up in 2000, has grown in size and stature since its cult roots at the Prince Charles Cinema and today is internationally renowned for discovering exciting and original horror fantasy genre films and for supporting the talent behind them, helping to launch the careers of such directors as Simon Rumley, Christopher Smith, Eli Roth, Neil Marshall and Simon Hunter.
Over the years the festival directors, Greg Day, Alan Jones, Paul McEvoy and Ian Rattray, have developed FrightFest into a brand leader for horror film, expanding its footprint in the UK by hosting special events throughout the year and joining forces with the Glasgow Film Festival, where they run an established three-day event. They have teamed up with FAB Press to publish a series of ‘The FrightFest Guide To…’ books and have an exclusive partnership with Signature Entertainment to release films under the festival’s thriving label ‘FrightFest Presents’. You can catch the documentary FRIGHTFEST: BENEATH THE DARK HEART OF CINEMA on Amazon.
