Bird People

Bird People (2014) is a French drama with a fantasy streak you can watch online on iFILM. Everything happens in and around a transit hotel by Paris airport, where two lives quietly come apart.

An American engineer, burned out by work and everyone's expectations, locks himself in a hotel room and decides to walk away from all of it at once — the job, the marriage, the whole shape of his old life. Meanwhile a young chambermaid working the same hotel goes through something she can't explain, and the ordinary world loses its edges. The two strands run side by side and barely touch; the film all but splits in half. Josh Charles and Anaïs Demoustier each carry one side.

Director Pascale Ferran builds slow, watchful cinema about freedom and the urge to break loose, then takes a sharp turn into magic realism in its second movement. It screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. This one rewards patience: hushed, odd, closer to poetry than to plot. Stream Bird People (2014) online on iFILM.