Movie Thoughts: The Starling (2021)

• Released: September 12th, 2021
• Directed by: Theodore Melfi
• Running time: 1h 42min
• Rating 2/5

Synopsis

A wife and husband must find their own ways to cope with grief and save their relationship after their newborn child dies.

My Thoughts

This is not a bad idea for a movie. A grieving couple both dealing with their sadness in a very different way is an interesting idea for a plot. Especially if the characters are very distinct and the relationships are well-written.

And I do really feel for the husband (Jack) here, who is in a clinic because of his mental health issues, and him having suicidal tendencies. He's a flawed character but he's still genuinely intriguing and you do root for him.

I can't say the same for our main character and his wife, Lilly. I'm sorry, but I hated this woman with every fiber of my being. No matter how sad she is over losing her child, that is never an excuse to turn this grief into abuse. In her case, animal abuse and murder.

Throughout the plot while Jack is at the clinic, Lilly is looking after their house and garden alone. Turns out there's a couple of very territorial starlings in her garden. And Lilly deals with this in a predictable way: She turns to harming the animals instead of respecting that they have a right to the nature in her garden as well. She kills one of the starlings using poison, and later injures another badly to the point it almost dies.

She does feel regret after both instances and does manage to nurse the second starling back to health, but to me that doesn't undo the absolute vile acts of harming the animals in the first place. I don't give a shit how bad she feels for harming them, she shouldn't have been doing that in the first place. It's her own damn fault that one starling dies and the other was gravely injured.

I get that she's a grieving mother, and that you can write a flawed character. But in this movie I felt legit disgusted to be following this main character for most of the runtime. At first I did root for her a bit as obviously it's sad that her child died, but as soon as she started to consider harming the birds I felt unease, and of course then she had to turn into an animal-abusing and killing monster. That's when any sympathy for this character left me. Even if she lost ten children instead of one, that's never an excuse to start abusing innocent animals. 

So yeah. I don't know. I wouldn't say that the movie itself is terrible, it is competently made, but I legit hated its main character so much. Jack is better, but he's not really our lead (Lilly is), so we're stuck with this animal-abusing maniac as our lead for the entire movie.