Birdhouse

115270 original

Four guano-spattered women hide out in the Coronet cinema in Bodega Bay. They're survivors of the avian infestation from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, and as they quiver with fear they perform a splintered re-enactment of the bizarre recent events.

Jammy Voo are a clowning collective, though Birdhouse owes at least as much to bizarre, post-modern sketch comedy. There's little linear narrative, with the four buttoned-up ladies shuffling between comic skits, musical interludes and puppetry. Just as they fluttered around Tippi Hedren, birds are everywhere: with feathers and eggs emerging from the most unlikely places, and the threatening sound of wing flaps always in the air. Birdhouse feels as much an exploration of 1960s cinema in general as of The Birds in particular. The scraps of narrative that emerge are classic tropes, and there are some terrific moments of visual invention as tiny black pegs cluster on the roof of a doll's house, or the women take a drive complete with a shadow puppet variant on poor man's process.

There's so much to look at that the lack of any solid plot feels forgivable, though there are several intriguing strands that could be developed further. Jammy Voo successfully develop a sensation of creeping dread and paranoia, and obliquely link it to the great atomic fear that perched above America. Birdhouse is never explicitly political, it's having too much fun for that, but the shadows of the Cold War, 9/11 and other modern nightmares circle threateningly overheard.