Even in this, The Year of Few Movies™, there are still enough to produce weirdly coincidental (or are they??) trends.

For instance: the murmurations in The Painted Bird (read! read! and read!), Rebecca (too blah to write/read about), and Kindred (I’ll let you know (or not) in a few weeks).

But first, the question I would’ve been asking before looking up the word: wtf is a murmuration?!

George, Charles, and Noah — take it away:

“Murmuration refers to the phenomenon that results when hundreds, sometimes thousands, of starlings fly in swooping, intricately coordinated patterns through the sky.“

Want to see an example? Well, all you need to do is watch one of the three movies listed above!

…or, just skip to the two-minute mark of this trailer:

I can’t speak (yet!) to its usage in Kindred, but for the other two, the murmurations seem to denote the wondrous cruelty — or cruel wonder? — of nature, from the natural environment to human nature, and how easily the beauty of apparent unity can be disrupted by a formerly-unified community of individuals turning on each other.

Needless to say, a relevant theme for the aforementioned trademark, especially in these disUnited States of America.