Bird In Hand: A Daughter’s Desperation
by Aayushi Agarwal
Like many others, I find myself drawn to mother-daughter stories. The love that often cannot be divorced from regret and the regret that can arise in spite of the love—this tension is the feeding ground for a good story. Melody C. Roscher’s Bird in Hand (2025) is no exception, exploring the nuances of being raised as biracial with only one present parent.
Drawing from the producer’s own experience as someone who is biracial, Bird in Hand follows a young bride-to-be who arrives unannounced at her emotionally distant white mother’s rural home, to plan her wedding. As they scout wedding venues, their inadequate attempts at bonding continue to fall short, chipping away to reveal an emotionally complex and fraught relationship.
Alisha Wainwright beautifully portrays the desperation of a lonely daughter as Bird. Every time Carlotta, her mother, can’t remember Bird’s food preferences, or snaps at her for crying, the quiet devastation on her face strikes a simple heartfelt chord. Halfway through the film, Bird turns to her stepfather and about her mother, says, “She has a temper . . . she opens up if you get her mad enough.” It’s easy to see how Bird has grown up to be so unhappy and self-destructive, fighting to get what she needed from her mother, and cycling through relationships searching for that very answer.
Christine Lahti’s performance as Carlotta makes you want to turn away from the screen, painful in its reality. Her resentment of her daughter is hard to watch, but within that, the love is impossible to ignore. You have sympathy for her journey as a single mother, but the frustration you feel at her behavior is palpable. When Bird burst into tears in front of her, she scolds her for crossing her boundaries, telling Bird to keep her emotions to herself. Roscher’s voice shines through in these moments, maintaining a somber tone within the film’s vivid cinematography.
Unable to find peace with her mother, Bird searches for her absent Black father, a member of a local wedding band. We watch as she makes attempts again and again to reach out, only to hesitate at the last minute and back out. The film’s portrayal of “daddy issues” is almost predictable as Bird turns to their older white male neighbor for comfort and validation—a relationship that quickly becomes almost uncomfortable to watch.
Strong as the film’s storytelling and directing is, it comes loose with the dynamic between Bird and Dennis, the neighbor. The racial dynamics within the film are ever-present, a weight that colors every interaction, and they are most heavily emphasised within Bird and Dennis’s relationship. Dennis and his younger wife moved to Carlotta’s town in order to “reclaim” their plantation property, calling it their UTN project (Updating The Narrative)—an awkward attempt at white saviorism. The unfolding of this plotline is ambitious but clumsy, one that couldn’t quite find its place in such a full story.
Bird in Hand is a movie that requires some parsing through, a story that remains earnest and buoyant, but still weighed down by its material. It doesn’t hesitate from exploring complex and nuanced emotions and identities, and in that courage, it finds its strength.