So this is a British movie, and it’s extremely British, like “turn on the closed captions if you want to understand it” British. It’s set in some poor, coal-mining small town — one small enough that a young man out on the town for a night ends up at the same pub his mom is at — and it’s about this boy.

His family life is terrible, with a violent, bullying older brother, an emotionally explosive, violent, indifferent mother, and no dad. His school life is bad — there’s an extended scene of gym class that’s almost over-the-top in how cruelly unfair it is to him. But also, he’s a casual thief and dgaf about school, and mostly seems to just drift along aimlessly.

… except when he sees a falcon, and becomes consumed with the idea of training a falcon of his own. He steals a book on training the birds, steals a fledgling from its nest, and — patiently, carefully — proceeds to train it well.

In school, there’s a moment where he’s asked to speak about something, and he’s his usual mumbling indifference until he’s prompted to talk about the bird, which he then does with eloquence and passion, and there’s where the film’s beauty lies, that this poor kid in these shitty circumstances can feel this strongly and powerfully about this bird, and apply himself so diligently to training it in a way that he doesn’t about anything else in his life. It’s kind of a paean to the essential humanity and capacity for wonder that all people have.

And then his shitty brother kills the bird, and the last scene is him burying it, and that’s a paean to how difficult it is to escape from a shitty situation, and about how he’ll probably grow up to be a coal-miner no matter how much he hates the idea, I guess.