The haunting Depeche Mode track “Little 15,” written by Martin Gore, plays a key role in Bleeding Blue Bird, a new surrealist drama from director Lev Prudkin. The film draws on Symbolist theatre and dream logic to explore obsession, transformation, and the fragile boundary between art and life.
A Story Where Stage and Reality Collide
Bleeding Blue Bird follows an international troupe preparing a staging of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird. When the actor cast as the Cat abandons his role, the director steps in, triggering a collapse between rehearsal and reality. Outsiders invade the stage, archetypes fracture, and the pursuit of happiness mutates into obsession and corruption.
The film stars Arthur Darvill (Doctor Who, Broadchurch) as the director forced onto the stage, and Hannah Arterton (Walking on Sunshine, The Peripheral) as the Queen of Night. Their performances ground a story that moves between allegory and dream, carrying audiences into a hall of mirrors where performance overtakes lived experience.
A Soundtrack Anchored by Depeche Mode
The music of Depeche Mode provides one of the film’s most striking elements. “Little 15” underscores key moments with its atmospheric intensity, anchoring the surreal imagery with a sound that resonates deeply across generations of listeners.
Alongside the Depeche Mode track, the soundtrack includes contributions from electronic artists Actress and Else, as well as an original score by Jim Cornick and Matt Loveridge. Together, they create a sonic landscape as fragile and transformative as the visual one.
Director Lev Prudkin explains: “The music of Depeche Mode carries a universal resonance. ‘Little 15’ became part of the film’s heartbeat, linking our story of obsession and metamorphosis with a sound that has moved generations.”
An Artistic Lineage
Prudkin is the grandson of Mark Prudkin, a leading actor of the Moscow Art Theatre and a student of Konstantin Stanislavski. Growing up backstage, he often watched productions from the director’s box, imagining the theatre as a place where transformations were constant and dangerous. This legacy infuses Bleeding Blue Bird, which is less an adaptation of Maeterlinck’s play than a confrontation with its
Symbolist heritage.
Filmed at Kyiv’s historic Theatre on Podil, the production combines modernist design with a setting steeped in history. The visual style draws from Symbolism, surrealism, and metacinema, placing the film in dialogue with works such as Bergman’s Persona and Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.
A Meeting Point for Cinema and Music Culture
With its combination of avant-garde imagery and iconic music, Bleeding Blue Bird is as much a cultural event as a film. For Depeche Mode fans, it offers the rare chance to hear one of the band’s most evocative tracks woven into a new artistic context.
For film audiences, it is an exploration of how art escapes the stage and overtakes life itself.