With Hen, Andrea Arnold has created an entire new model of cinema

The opening shot of Hen, Kent-born director Andrea Arnold’s new cinematic masterpiece, is a clue that may assist to unlock the confounding movie that can comply with. We see two birds swooping via the air, coursing via a pastel blue sky – however our view is partially obscured by an unsightly metallic fence. The picture can also be being snapped by 12-year-old Bailey (performed by display screen newcomer Nykiya Adams), a fellow Kent native who spends a lot of the movie taking photos on her smartphone.

Dwelling in a graffiti-strewn squat with a feckless Dad (Barry Keoghan) and her disaffected half-brother, Hunter (Jason Buda), Bailey clearly feels uncontrolled. Her father’s equally disaffected associates come and go as they please and he’s about to marry Kayleigh (Frankie Field), a lady he’s recognized for a number of months – by no means thoughts his daughter’s disapproval. So, like many a photographer earlier than her, the 12-year-old captures pictures to try to make sense of her world, to create a model of it that she will be able to include.

Mirroring the birds behind the metallic fence, she may even discover a technique to soar above her prosaic environment. One morning, out in lush fields away from the violence of the city, she encounters a person who calls himself Hen (Franz Rogowski). He says that, having grown up regionally and moved away way back, he’s making an attempt to reconnect along with his household. Slowly, over the course of the movie, Hen reveals himself as a magical determine who can apparently bend actuality. This initially manifests with relative subtlety, earlier than the complete extent of his skills are revealed.

Critics haven’t fairly recognized what to make of Hen, Arnold’s sixth characteristic movie and the most recent proof of her standing as a bonafide modern-day auteur. In an age the place essential consensus appears to have change into the norm, the image has proved curiously divisive. There have been one or two raves, nevertheless it’s equally been described as “chaotic” and “flawed” and accused of “suave indulgences” that detract “from its purported authenticity”. That is maybe a sign of Hen’s bizarre energy and a reluctance to imagine that the director may have mixed social realism with magical realism in such an unprecedented means.

63-year-old Andrea Arnold’s complete profession has been equally audacious. After a trio of brief movies (the third of which, 2003’s Wasp, took that yr’s Oscar for Finest Dwell Motion Quick Movie), she launched her debut characteristic, 2006’s Crimson Street. Principally shot in response to guidelines outlined by Dogme 95 (Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s 1995 filmmaking motion that, amongst stipulations, decreed filmmakers should use handheld cameras), this was an aching depiction of grief that cemented her primarily optimistic outlook.

Arnold adopted Crimson Street with additional social realism in 2009’s acclaimed Fish Tank, set on east London council property, earlier than pivoting to interval drama with 2011’s Wuthering Heights, an experimentally gritty adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel. After these most British of initiatives, she naturally made an all-American highway epic: 2016’s American Honey starring Riley Keough and Shia Labeouf, her first true masterpiece.

Hen would possibly characteristic a call-back to American Honey in a shot of Bailey floating in water as a quick respite from the challenges she faces, simply as Star (Sasha Lane) did within the earlier movie, nevertheless it’s arguably nearer to Crimson Street in Arnold’s oeuvre. It is a movie that depicts a brutalist, apparently merciless world, however provides ever-brighter flashes of hope and magic. What’s completely different is that, this time, the magic is literal.

Cinema has, efficiently or in any other case, beforehand mixed depictions of city decay with fantastical parts: see Ryan Gosling’s 2014 directorial debut Misplaced River. But Hen flies alone as a British social realist movie that explodes its naturalistic world with such rainbow-hued streaks of magical realism. A overview of Fish Tank described Arnold as “Ken Loach’s pure successor”. Together with her new movie, she transcends that restrictive description just like the birds dipping and diving above the metallic fence in its dreamy opening shot.