Birdie
2022 · 13m · USA
Directed by Andrew Edison
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
A young woman returns to babysit the troubled 14-year-old boy she once cared for, only to be taken hostage when she stumbles onto his violent plan to attack his school.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally, someone takes the school-shooter premise and actually *does* something with it—strips away the spectacle, traps you in a room with the ideation itself, and lets the babysitter become the only thing standing between fantasy and reality. It's the kind of subversive two-hander that makes you uncomfortable in exactly the right way, which means every other scout will probably hate it.
Edison's restraint in the mise-en-scène recalls the tension-through-confinement lineage of Hitchcock and contemporary work like *Funny Games*, where the formal compression of space becomes a moral argument about complicity and intervention. The dynamic inversion—caretaker reversed into negotiator—positions itself deliberately within the hostage-thriller tradition while interrogating its own premises.
The film's entire weight rests on the decision to keep the camera close and static during the confession—no flashy cutting, no music swells—which means everything lands on the actors' breath and the boy's escalating rationalization, and that choice transforms what could've been exploitation into something genuinely unsettling and precise.
Reviews
A School Shooter Kidnaps His Babysitter
Impressed viewers with its realism, honestly capturing the egocentrism and vulnerability of a young teenager in a precise manner — a slice of near reality.
Festivals
- Hawaii International Film Festival 2022
- Manhattan Film Festival 2022
- Beverly Hills Film Festival 2022
- Capri Hollywood International Film Festival 2022
- Big Muddy Film Festival 2022
- Catalina Film Festival 2022