We are 12 minutes into Australian directors Jack Clark and Jim Weir’s debut feature film Birdeater when the title finally appears on screen. In those masterful first 12 minutes we are introduced to a couple.

Most nights he, Louie, lies and says he is going to his dad’s place when really he is going to a golfing range. And she, Irene, for some reason never leaves the house at all, and is sleeping most of the time.

All of this is conveyed through little dialogue, repetitive sequences, montage and spectacular cinematography. And even though not much is happening in the film, you’re on the edge of your seat. Something is off here…

“We started with this relationship. Having a relationship where the couple had separation anxiety … We have this couple that need to be around each other and eventually you separate them and see what happens,” says Weir.

And what better way to separate a couple than at a buck’s party. So the main plot of Birdeater unravels as Louie, breaking tradition, invites girls to his bucks party. And the film basically roars on from there.

“As soon as we had the buck’s party element then we had almost a new genre of film that we were looking at and that's when it really became what it is. Taking a close look at how groups of men behave and how groups of men react to bad male behaviour,” says Weir.

In April, The Australian Institute of Criminology’s National Homicide Monitoring Program found that 34 women were killed by an intimate partner in 2022-23, an increase of 28 per cent on the previous year.

And although Birdeater doesn’t concern itself with these extreme cases, it aims to explore the problem of toxic male behaviour at its root. With murderers, it is easy for men to detach themselves from the behaviour of those characters whereas with Birdeater the duo wanted to force men to confront themselves.

“We wanted to try and hit closer to the bone, go after the more kind of insidious types of abuse that we think is actually common with guys that we grew up with and went to school with,” says Weir.

“So we wanted basically a shifting scale of different kinds of men in our ensemble in a way where, hopefully, no guy watching this would feel totally safe. Everyone would be able to see themselves in some way depicted on screen and have to reckon with that.”

Birdeater was filmed in the small village of St Albans in Hawkesbury, NSW and despite exploring such universal themes, the film still feels very Australian and this is a translation of the duo’s individuality and identity which is daring in a film culture that is led by other countries.

“We have this idea of mateship in Australia which is something that we build a lot of our identity around,” says Clark. “But it does feel like it's somewhat exclusionary to women - it feels like it's structured around men being friends.”

“So the film was a little bit about how that makes people outside of that circle feel, and people are able to really easily translate that into a similar part of their own culture. So by finding something specific to Australia, which I think it is, that specificity helps.”

Weir and Clark met each other whilst studying at AFTRS, a film school in Sydney, and they say that it is through their collaboration, that this film was such a success.

“Often we will be arguing about something and we essentially never compromise - we never really meet in the middle we try and work out which idea is better and quite often that means that there's actually a third idea that neither of us have thought of and it ends up being what we go with,” says Weir.

The film will be released in cinemas on July 18. The characters are interesting, the ideas are thoughtful, the score is inventive and the overall look of the film is mesmerising. Even though it is Clark and Weir’s first feature film, Birdeater shows that they have a strong command of their ideas and know how to communicate them visually in creative and stunning ways.

Birdeater