White Bird Film Review: Light Shining Through Darkness

White Bird takes a heartfelt approach to a tale of light shining through darkness, proving the timelessness of stories from one of humanity’s worst eras.

Let’s put aside the connections to Wonder for now and just look at White Bird on its own. As a story of the Jewish plight in one of the darkest settings in history, and of the efforts of citizens to bring light into that darkness however they can, this doesn’t say anything profoundly new … but it says it extremely well. A lot of the credit there goes to Marc Forster. I’m always impressed by how this director can fuse sweet and heartfelt with intense and gritty so seamlessly in such a timeless way, right down to the deliberately glum aesthetics and lighting in this movie that make the more vibrant moments feel just a bit more impactful. The same goes for Thomas Newman’s score as it adds spiritual somberness with every swell or croon.

White Bird is delicate and grim where it needs to be, plunging you into the tension-filled horrors of what people like Sara were going through without ever making them feel sensationalized or sanitized. The raw, complex human emotions that can bring out the lowest of people are never shied away from, which means when the film goes more saccharine and even cheesy, those moments feel earned. They’re still fittingly subdued while getting across the magic that even the smallest acts of good will can bring to someone in such dour times. Nothing is ever in-your-face, even when it seems like it should be tailor-made that way on the page.

Ariella Glaser and Orlando Schwerdt give two phenomenal child performances, and their chemistry is warm, organic, and even layered the more time they spend with each other. Everything involving them amounts to, again, not the most original themes or ideas – the power of kindness and bringing hope and light to survive a cruel world – but ones that still resonate regardless. White Bird also doesn’t shy away from the cost of such good acts or the emotional limits that a person struggles to overcome in keeping them up. Even the purest souls in the film have their breaking points, and the movie acknowledges that such actions require effort to not just perform, but spread.

Which leads us back to the Wonder connection. I initially didn’t see why this movie needed to tie into a seemingly completely different film, and I was worried that doing so would add a gimmicky undertone to such serious material (even though the original “White Bird” novel is itself a spinoff to the “Wonder” novel). But even though I joked about how weird the connection between these two films is, it surprisingly adds quite a bit to the story. Both movies have the themes of spreading kindness and why it’s so important, with Wonder being about a boy with facial deformities coming into his own despite the constant ridicule he faces at school.

White Bird is obviously dealing with a severely graver form of hostility, but the core ideas are similar … and because it takes place in a different time period, that illustrates the long-standing cycle of hatred that can only be broken by sharing experiences and bridging the gaps of generations, ages, and settings. This moral would work even if White Bird was a completely independent film (and it can be viewed as such, in case you don’t care to see Wonder). But after seeing firsthand, through Wonder, the impact that both kind and hateful actions can have across those gaps, everything these movies convey is made noticeably more touching. Especially through the lens of Julian, who is clearly remorseful for his bullying actions in Wonder but doesn’t understand that remorse alone is not enough.

White Bird is one of those films where, no, it’s not some revolutionary thesis on the good of mankind … but it’s nonetheless something that’s valuable to have. There’s a reason so many works of art and nonfiction continuously venture back to the specific time and events portrayed here: the impact and lessons they bring to the world will never lose their importance. So many of the most effective reminders of the worst and best of humanity can be found by revisiting the topics and experiences of this era. When that’s done, all I can ask is for the work itself to do so in an emotionally resonant way. White Bird succeeds there, and I think you’d be very hard-pressed to find someone who, at the very least, would deny the heart that went into it.

White Bird will be released in US theaters on October 4, 2024.