108 min | PG-13 | September 23, 2022 | Amazon Studios
Birdy is the fourteen-year-old daughter of a broke medieval lord who decides the fastest way out of debt is to sell her into marriage. She spends the year sabotaging every rich suitor he drags to the manor. Lena Dunham puts a modern pop soundtrack over the 13th century and mostly gets away with it.
The year is 1290. Catherine, called Birdy, is the fourteen-year-old daughter of Lord Rollo, a nobleman whose lands produce less than his appetites require. Rollo’s solution is to marry his daughter to the richest man who will take her. Birdy’s solution is to make herself unmarriageable. Lena Dunham builds a medieval coming-of-age comedy around a girl who understands that her family treats her body as a line item. The film is about a child learning the exact price her world has put on her.
Bella Ramsey plays Birdy with a restless physical energy that never settles into cuteness. Ramsey makes the scheming funny and the fear underneath it real. Andrew Scott plays Lord Rollo as a man whose cruelty comes from weakness, not malice. He is broke and frightened and takes it out on the one asset he can sell. Billie Piper plays Lady Aislinn, the mother who survives one dangerous pregnancy after another and still sides with her daughter. Paul Kaye turns the suitor Shaggy Beard into a grotesque old lecher, and Joe Alwyn gives Uncle George the easy warmth that makes Birdy’s crush legible.
Dunham writes and directs from Karen Cushman’s novel, and she keeps the book’s diary structure as the film’s spine. Birdy narrates her own year in dated entries, and the device lets the comedy stay in her voice. Dunham scores the 13th century with modern pop, dropping contemporary songs over feast days and muddy courtyards. The anachronism is the argument. The gap between the medieval frame and the modern soundtrack insists that a teenage girl’s interior life has not changed in seven hundred years. The production design stays grounded in dirt and candlelight so the music never tips the whole thing into camp.
The film works best when it trusts Birdy to be unlikable. Her schemes hurt people, and Dunham does not always let her off the hook for it. The tone wobbles when the modern jokes crowd out the period stakes, and the back half softens what the first half sharpened. Birdy wants a life that her century has no slot for, and the ending bends the rules to give her one. The result is a comedy that is smarter about the problem than about the solution. It is a sharp, generous film that flinches at the last turn.