Bailey looks for attention and adventure elsewhere
Tale
Bailey lives with her brother Hunter and her father Bug, who raises them alone in a squat in northern Kent. Bug doesn’t have much time to devote to them.
Edited into Fontaines DC: Bug (2024)
Barry Keoghan dropped out of Gladiator II (2024) to star in this movie instead.. There are two lovely performances to enjoy in this story of the twelve year old "Bailey" (Nykiya Adams).
She lives in a squat with her dad “Bug” (Barry Keoghan), brother "Hunter" (Jason Buda) and her soon-to-be stepmum "Kayleigh" (Frankie Box)
It’s that impending wedding, and the wearing of a pretty garish pink cat-suit, that puts her at odds with her well-meaning dad and sees her left to amuse herself amidst the fields of Kent. It’s there that she encounters the rather enigmatic "Bird" (Franz Rogowski) who is looking for his parents who lived in a Gravesend tower block near her home.
With the quest for her new friend’s parents, her desire to help her mum and siblings and her dad’s pressure to engage with his own hopes for happiness, the young "Bailey" has not her challenges to seek
She decides to try and help this rather quirky chap and quickly their lives become curiously linked as we discover that her mother (Jasmine Jobson) is struggling through an abusive relationship with boyfriend "Skate" (James Nelson-Joyce) whilst also trying to bring up three youngsters. Keoghan features energetically as he zips around the housing estates on his e-scooter, and his character serves well to help keep the main characterizations going – and it’s on that front there’s a charmingly understated chemistry developed between Adams and Rogowski that mixes their respective back- stories with a soupçon of the mystic and plenty of allegorical imagery to introduce quite elusive themes of freedom, family and quite frequently fun, too.
It’s a slow burn, but it works
There are also some fairly violent undertones, and we are left in no doubt that her life and that of her family has been and will remain fairly turbulent – but those points are not brought to us via a sledge-hammer, more by gentle observation and development of engaging personalities that evolve gently but powerfully over a couple of hours.