Movie Review ~ Birdeater

The Australian bush has long been a fertile backdrop for cinematic explorations of psychological unraveling and moral decay.  From the sun-scorched menace of Wake in Fright to the supernatural serenity of Picnic at Hanging Rock, filmmakers have mined its mysterious vastness for unsettling narratives. While Birdeater shares DNA with these classic films, there’s a primal truth pulsing through debut directors Jack Clark and Jim Weir’s aggressive thriller that burrows under your skin with a sharp savagery you won’t soon forget.

Set and shot amidst the rugged bushland of St. Albans, New South Wales, Birdeater lures us into familiar territory with its deceptively simple premise: a bachelor party gone wrong. (Sounds familiar?  Yes, but just wait.) Beneath this surface lies a serpentine labyrinth of fractured relationships and buried secrets.  As Louie (Mackenzie Fearnley) gathers his friends for what should be a night of celebration, cracks in their camaraderie begin to show, turning the event into a raucous gauntlet of conflict and revelation. From the first frame, the bushland emerges as more than a setting—it is a silent predator, its isolation and menace amplifying every human flaw.

The dynamics within the group are carefully drawn, each character bringing their own volatility to the mix. Louie’s relationship with his fiancée Irene (Shabana Azeez) teeters on a razor’s edge, the inner-workings of their relationship finding its seams ripping under the pressure of old wounds and fresh betrayals. Meanwhile, Christian couple Charlie (Jack Bannister) and Grace (Clementine Anderson) ricochet between tenderness and gaslit hostility, their trust issues getting the better of both.  Dylan’s (Ben Hunter) irresistible mix of charm and danger is a living embodiment of unpredictability, while Irene’s friend Sam (Harley Wilson) appears to have been invited by Louie to mend a fence or shut him out forever. And on the periphery, Murph (Alfie Gledhill) observes it all with quiet uncertainty, his outsider perspective mirroring the audience’s growing dread.

Clark and Weir build their story with remarkable restraint, allowing tension to build to a roiling boil before delivering explosive moments. Their nod to Wake in Fright, which is glimpsed in the background of one scene, is more than homage; it’s a statement of intent. Like that classic, Birdeater peels back layers of masculine bravado to expose the raw nerves beneath. The directors’ ability to balance character-driven drama with psychological suspense is particularly impressive for a debut, proving their instinct for pacing and mood.  It occasionally feels like scenes are repeating themselves with different actors saying the same thing, yet at 113 minutes, it never feels like it’s dragging its feet too much.

Fearnley crafts Louie into a man desperately maintaining a façade that’s cracking by the minute; opposite him, Azeez delivers a layered look into Irene, who defies conventional tropes as the complexities of her character are revealed in bits and pieces.  The Irene we meet at the film’s beginning is not the same one we know at the mid-point or the end.  In fact, you may find yourself put into a challenging position at the film’s conclusion, thanks to the brilliant way Azeez has pitched her performance. 

The remaining cast is uniformly solid (including Caroline McQuade’s  Lady Lazarus, who boldly appears in an empty field to perform the most disturbing fully nude striptease you’ll see at the theater in 2025).  Yet it is Hunter who steals the show as Dylan, his presence magnetically unnerving.  Hunter holds his cards close to his chest, letting bits and pieces of what’s underneath the alpha male shine through.  There’s a thrilling inevitability to his scenes; he’s the life of the party, yet he’s heartsick…but for what? 

Capturing both the sweeping beauty of the bush and its suffocating menace, Roger Stonehouse’s cinematography finds danger in every shadow and twisted branch.  Even indoor scenes gradually start to feel more cramped and constrained, the thick tension appearing to make the walls close in on the revelers.  That sense of claustrophobia grows with each frame, the vastness of the unadorned land around them paradoxically trapping both the characters and the audience in the only safe space to settle in.  As Andreas Dominguez’s score floats between nervy jazz improvisation and industrial drones, the music is tuned in to the characters’ deteriorating grip on civility toward one another. Ben Anderson’s editing work deserves special recognition—despite the film’s fractured shooting schedule (it lost financing after four weeks of filming, delaying the last two weeks for six months), he maintains a crushing momentum that never releases its grip.

However, the main attraction for genre fans is Birdeater’s willingness to delve into thorny, uncomfortable territory.  Themes of power, consent, and toxic relationships are often just beneath the surface, occasionally coming into focus with disconcerting clarity.   To its great credit, the film resists easy answers, instead choosing to poke at scabs and wounds that haven’t healed. It’s very much the reason why the Lady Lazarus scene is so rattling.  Her near-threatening presence, emerging from a dark field fully naked, forces the characters—and the viewer—to confront uncomfortable truths about the masks we wear when we discuss desire and dominance.

Though the film occasionally skirts the edges of deeper exploration—raising more questions about power dynamics and co-dependency than it prefers to answer and never fully sinking its teeth into any of them—it avoids the pitfalls of base exploitation or oversimplification. Instead, its best scenes are the ones that thrive on ambiguity, putting it to the audience to fixate on the character’s shortcomings instead of asking them to see the good in them. 

Not every audience loves an uncomfortable unknowable, but Birdeater finds one in its final moment in order to deliver a conclusion that is as breathless as it is satisfying.  It’s a bold choice that cements the film as a standout in the recent run of uncompromising Australian thrillers.  With Birdeater, Clark and Weir announce themselves as formidable new voices in cinema. Their debut is a ferocious, haunting work that combines visceral thrills with psychological depth, never letting us forget that, at the end of the day, as we turn off the lights, the most terrifying predators are often the ones we cannot see.