14/40
Bailey seeks attention and adventure elsewhere
Bailey lives with her brother Hunter and father Bug, who raise them alone in north Kent. Bug doesn’t have much time for them. Barry Keoghan dropped out of Gladiator II (2024) and starred in this film instead.
Edited in Fontaines DC: Bug (2024)
This story of twelve-year-old Bailey features two wonderful performances. (Nykiya Adams). She lives squatting with her dad "Bug" (Barry Keoghan), brother "Hunter" (Jason Buda) and her soon-to-be stepmother "Kayleigh" (Frankie Box).
It’s there that she encounters the rather enigmatic "Bird"; (Franz Rogowski), who is searching for her parents, who lived in the Gravesend Tower near her home
Because of that upcoming wedding and wearing a pretty pink cat costume, she falls out with her well-meaning dad and finds herself left to frolic in the Kent countryside. She decides to try to help this rather strange boy and their lives soon become curiously intertwined as we learn that her mother (Jasmine Jobson) is struggling to build a fractious relationship with her boyfriend, Skate; (James Nelson-Joyce), while also trying to raise three young children. Between searching for her new boyfriend’s parents, wanting to help her mother and siblings, and the pressure from her father to get involved in his own hopes of happiness, young Bailey is not without challenges to look for.
It burns slowly, but it works
Keoghan energetically zips around the residential areas on his e-scooter, and his character does a great job of keeping the main characters alive – and it’s on that front that the delightfully understated chemistry between Adams and Adams develops. Rogowski, who mixes their respective stories with a soup of mysticism and plenty of allegorical imagery to deliver some pretty hard-to-grasp themes of freedom, family, and, quite often, fun. There are also some pretty edgy subtexts, and we have no doubt that her life and that of her family have been and will continue to be pretty turbulent, but those things are not brought to us by hammering, but rather by gentle observation and the development of fascinating personalities that develop gently but powerfully over the course of a couple of hours.