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“Is it too actual for ya?” blares within the background of Andrea Arnold’s newest movie, “Chicken,” a 12-year-old Bailey rides along with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug , on his electrical scooter previous scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The music’s query — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for “Chicken.” Arnold’s movies are rigorous of their gritty naturalism. Her fiction movies — that is her first in eight years — have a tendency towards bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world places. Her final movie, “Cow,” documented a mom cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold focuses on capturing souls, human and in any other case, in soulless environments. A dream of one thing extra is tantalizing simply out of attain. In “American Honey,” peace involves Star solely when she submerges underwater.
In “Chicken,” although, this sense of otherworldly risk is made flesh, or a minimum of feathery. After a complicated evening, Bailey awakens in a subject the place she encounters a wierd determine in a skirt who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His title, he says, is Chicken. He has a tender sweetness that doesn’t in any other case exist in Bailey’s hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She’s skeptical of him at first, however he retains lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck on occasion like he’s watching out for Bailey. And he does be careful for her, serving to Bailey by a tough coming of age: the abusive boyfriend of her mom ; her half brother slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a brand new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has the ironic impact of breaking the spell that has marked Arnold’s finest movies. “Chicken,” which opens in theaters Friday, is, just like the writer-director’s vivid earlier work, a film solely she might make. Arnold has described it as the toughest factor she’s ever created, and it’s straightforward to applaud her for greedy at one thing in “Chicken” that finally is simply out of attain. A resolutely real looking filmmaker turning to magical realism has the uncomfortable impact of creating the entire film, not simply the Rogowski bits, really feel inauthentic. As an alternative of being “too actual for ya,” “Chicken,” with its in-your-face poverty and narrative extremes, by no means feels notably actual in any respect.
Probably the most incongruous elements of “Chicken,” although, won’t be the mysterious avian pal. Keoghan is a reliably arresting actor who right here feels misplaced. He doesn’t appear even vaguely fatherly, and whereas that may be a part of the purpose, too many different issues about Bug really feel extra performative than real. There’s his scheme to make use of hallucinogenic slime from a toad to pay for his marriage ceremony, for starters. Add in some karaoke scenes and the feeling creeps in that “Chicken” is being much less compelled by its personal story than it’s by a pursuit of Arnold’s earlier fashion.
“Chicken” might go down as a uncommon miss for Arnold however you’ll be able to nonetheless see the keenness of her eye and the nimbleness of her digital camera, along with her common cinematographer Robbie Ryan. And that’s true by no means a lot as when the digital camera is on Adams, a expertise, whose melancholy eyes say greater than all of the theatrics round her.
“Chicken,” a Mubi launch, is rated R by the Movement Image Affiliation for “language all through, some violent content material and drug materials.” Working time: 118 minutes. Two stars out of 4.
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