BROKEN BIRD

Director: Joanne Mitchell.
Cast: Rebecca Calder, James Fleet, Jay Taylor, Sacharissa Claxton. 
UK 2024. 96 mins.

OPENING FILM - WORLD PREMIERE - FrightFest celebrates one of its beloved supporters and genre savvy creatives with their astonishingly brilliant feature debut as director. As a writer, producer and actor, Joanne Mitchell has appeared at FrightFest in many guises in such banner attractions as INBRED, BAIT, EVIE, WOLF MANOR, BEFORE DAWN and ATTACK OF THE ADULT BABIES.

Now, she has skilfully turned her 2018 award-winning short SYBIL (original story Tracey Sheals) into a rich, absorbing and disturbing tale about a quiet soul in emotional turmoil. Sybil Chamberlain works as a professional mortician at a funeral parlour. She has spent her life looking for love. Brought up as a privileged, carefree child, at the age of ten, she lost everything in a tragic accident. A darkness fell over her as the bright lights of her life were snuffed out swiftly and cruelly. Now, an emptiness, an aching loneliness prevails, a gloomy void she seeks to fill. Reality and reason are slipping away from Sybil, and her dark desires are becoming more insatiable and progressively out of control. Will she ever find happiness and contentment, especially as the company she keeps is mainly deceased?

Rebecca Calder masterfully portrays Sybil in a riveting, nuanced interpretation of the complex character’s quirky, unsettling behaviour. See how Joanne Mitchell has honed her craft as a horror storyteller, capturing all and maintaining a firm grip on performance, story, and style to deliver the most beautifully creepy rendition of a tormented mind spiralling into a vortex of madness.