Dallas Film Now.

Bachelor parties aren’t often shown in the most flattering light in films. Someone either ends up dead, goes missing, or the ethical compromise that befalls the group turns into an apocalyptic rendering of friendship. Add another example to the pile with Jack Clark and Jim Weir’s BirdEater. Though no animals appear to be harmed in the making of the film, plenty of people’s spirits get crushed and flayed.

The couple at the center of the melee are Irine (Shabana Azeez) and Louis (Mackenzie Fearnley). Through some elliptical editing and less-is-more quick cuts, we understand their relationship is built on something unique. Every time he leaves their house, he gives her a pill and she goes to sleep. He tells her he’s working late, but then spends his nights driving golf balls or hanging with his friend Murph (Alfie Gledhill). The deception seems to be running high. And then, he does something incredibly “modern” and invites her to his upcoming bachelor party.

However, the party is more like a drug and alcohol-fueled camping trip with his oldest and best fest friends than the normal night of drinking and debauchery. They do things differently in Australia, but no less intense, led by the tweaky and slow-burn intensity of Dylan (a wonderful Ben Hunger), whose first appearance is presented in a shock jump-cut that pretends he’s more like a horror figure scampering out of the woods than a real person.

Rounding out the group are another couple, Charlie (Jack Bannister) and Grace (Clementine Anderson), professed “virgins” who slowly get drawn into the nocturnal games of toxic masculinity and paranoid conversations as the party wears on. No one is safe, and as the night goes deeper, the revelations about relationships, dominance, and past indiscretions bubble to the surface.

Highly competent in style and look, filmmakers Clark and Weir display a visual acuity in BirdEater that’s startling. Slow pans into a long monologue, precise editing that often creates more intrigue than the story probably has, and one sequence away from camp that would feel right at home in the neon-dread of a Nicolas Winding Refn effort, BirdEater is a tense and even complex study of modern relationships.

In one mesmerizing scene, the group play a game called “paranoid” around the campfire, which involves whispering a question to one person, and then hearing their name answer to that question out loud. Whether everyone else gets to hear the question is a matter of the flip of a coin. Naturally, this sets the brain a-reeling with Louis (who seems to be the natural target for all his friends), and it’s the perfect encapsulation of a film that wants to taunt and poke. It does this well.

BirdEater opens in the Dallas and Fort Worth area on Friday January 10th at the Denton Alamo Drafthouse. Visit https://drafthouse.com/dfw for tickets. The film also begins streaming on select VOD platforms on the same date.