‘The Thing with Feathers’ Review: Benedict Cumberbatch Is Trapped in an Overwrought Grief Fable
After the death of his wife, a grieving father slowly loses his grip on reality when he senses a mysterious presence lurking in the shadows.
Cinema is perhaps the artistic language least suited to metaphor. What literature—or even theater—can sustain within the conventions of its own form often becomes much harder to pull off on screen. Giving symbolic ideas a tangible, visual form is always a challenge. There’s the constant risk of becoming too literal, too heavy-handed, too obvious. And when, as in this case, the film operates within a realist framework, the line between profound and ridiculous is perilously thin.
The Thing with Feathers avoids completely collapsing into that trap thanks largely to the deeply committed performance at its center from the great Benedict Cumberbatch. Playing a father of two who has just lost his wife and is unable to process the sudden, devastating loss, the British actor throws himself into the role, doing everything he can to make the film’s central conceit feel believable and emotionally authentic. He doesn’t quite succeed—not because of any shortcoming on his part, but because the task is nearly impossible—but he does save the film from outright embarrassment. Dylan Southern’s movie rarely works, seldom generating anything beyond frustration and bewilderment.
It all began with Max Porter’s acclaimed 2015 novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, which won awards and critical praise before being adapted into an equally celebrated one-man stage production, originally starring Cillian Murphy as the widowed father—known simply as «Dad.» Now the story arrives on screen in the hope that what worked on the page and on stage will translate to cinema. But its central premise proves far more difficult to realize visually, and Southern never finds a way through that barrier.
The film opens by introducing us to a man—a graphic novelist—reeling from the death of his wife while struggling, unsuccessfully, to care for his two young sons (Richard and Henry Boxall), who are processing their grief in their own chaotic ways. Nothing seems capable of lifting them out of the literal darkness that surrounds them—a point Southern underscores with relentlessly gloomy cinematography—and the father steadily unravels. He loses his composure, succumbs to despair, and has no idea how to keep going. His children, in their own way, recognize what’s happening.
At the height of his breakdown, he begins hearing strange noises: windows flying open, voices where there should be none, objects moving on their own. Soon he encounters the titular winged creature: a gigantic crow that speaks to him. Physically performed by Eric Lampaert in costume and voiced by David Thewlis, the bird functions as an abrasive, even brutal therapist. As the man feels himself slipping toward madness, the crow—speaking with a rough, working-class accent—relentlessly berates him, criticizing everything he does and even mocking him for embodying the cliché of the grieving widowed father in the movies. The voice, of course, seems to come from a creature that clearly isn’t really there. Through these encounters, the protagonist slowly begins the painful process of confronting his grief.
Southern never leans into horror. Beyond a few early jump scares, he makes no attempt to frighten the audience with the crow’s presence. Instead, he simply places the creature within the story—with its awkward appearance and its endlessly irritating habit of materializing and disappearing—and gradually builds what probably worked onstage as an immediate, visceral emotional rupture. A director best known for music videos, Southern brings a different rhythm and vocabulary to the material—rapid-fire editing, a constantly present score—and the result is a kind of fantastical psychodrama that, rather than moving forward, increasingly folds in on itself.
Despite a premise that never quite comes together, The Thing with Feathers has its moving moments, thanks almost entirely to Cumberbatch, who holds the screen even in the relentless close-ups Southern favors. Simply through the anguish and bewilderment etched across his face, he conveys the emotional weight of a situation that feels impossible to endure. Eventually the children also establish their own connection to the mysterious creature, as the film shifts perspective and opens itself to the idea that this crow has come not to carry away the dead, but to jolt the living back to life. Even so, the pieces never fully click into place. What remains is the ultimately unsuccessful idea of a film about grief undone by an overwhelming excess of literalness.
