The Metamorphosis of Birds review – poetic grappling with family and loss

Ostensibly, The Metamorphosis of Birds is a docudrama about a group of siblings coming to terms with the death of their mother and the lifelong absence of their father, a sailor. Actors (many of them family members of the director Catarina Vasconcelos, whose grandmother was the matriarch) re-enact scenes, whilst a narrative voiceover describes memories and poetic thoughts. But the film’s hermetic and surrealist way with images pushes it beyond a simple exploration of grief, family history and mourning.

There is instead something more literary and free-associative with this film, with the actors’ faces rarely visible except in extreme close-up, the voiceover often taking off-kilter leaps of description. It often plays like a series of dreams, but the sort that feel just a little too real – the ones where you wake up and you have to ask somebody else if it really happened.

Vasconcelos has an eye, that is clear enough. In a scratchy 4:3 aspect ratio, she throws striking image after striking image at the viewer. There are passages that are bucolic and graceful: children playing in the bathtub, plants swaying gently in the garden, flowers blooming in time-lapse. Others are more surreal, or quietly funny: a passage describing power sockets as inherently feminine is interrupted by a woman switching on a loud hairdryer; a dead seahorse is worn as a hairpiece; a shot of hands cutting fruit pans upwards to reveal a giant bird where a head should be.

Perhaps the most searing image here is one reminiscent of a film from a different time and place. Towards the end, in a foggy landscape, a woman attempts to lift upright a tree that is tipped to the ground. It’s a reverse of the famous shot in Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, where Max von Sydow attempts to wrestle a tree to the ground with his bare hands. In that film it’s an expression of rage and vengeance – here the action is reversed in an attempt to build something anew, although the woman eventually gives up, the strength and weight of the tree eventually beating her.

The image suggests the film is an act of positive creation in a time of unease and grief, of an attempt to build something anew, an act that is simultaneously doomed in the march of nature and time. An inherently Sisyphean task, but not a fruitless one. A similar sense of unknowability is apparent in the film’s many shots of the sea, looming and dangerous.

For all its beauty, however, the film might just be a little bit too hermetic to push beyond its entirely worthwhile inner poetry. For every image that resonates, there is another that seems directionless – but that’s the contract you enter into with films such as this. In a modern Portuguese cinema that’s fertile with experimentation and excitement following the lifting of Pedro Costa and Miguel Gomes to international auteur status, Vasconcelos is certainly a talent worth keeping an eye on.

The Metamorphosis of Birds is released in UK cinemas on 11 March.