The Thing With Feathers

The last thing you need when your spouse has just died and you can hardly lift your head, let alone get your young boys to school on time, is an eight-foot crow squawking abuse. But that’s just what Benedict Cumberbatch’s nameless widower has to contend with in director Dylan Southern’s narrative feature debut, The Thing With Feathers. There are physical attacks, too, with a talon-slash here, a beak-gouge there, and pummelling wing-slaps everywhere else.

The assaultive crow in question — designed by Nicola Hicks, played by Eric Lampaert, and voiced by David Thewlis, who brings something of his tirades in Mike Leigh’s Naked to the (bird) table — is a metaphor, of course. Or rather a ‘metaphorror’, given this mournful drama leans into genre territory, recalling Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and J.A. Bayona’s A Monster Calls in how it conjures a dark fantasy monster to grapple with grief. Sadly, Southern’s adaptation of Max Porter’s lyrical 2015 novella Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, which was smartly adapted into a stage play starring Cillian Murphy in 2018, is a good deal less emotive than those titles.

Benedict Cumberbatch is the film’s strong point, going all-in as the desolate dad who suddenly finds himself facing a problem far worse than a messy house, burnt toast, and unwashed PE kits.

Benedict Cumberbatch is the film’s strong point, going all-in as the desolate dad who suddenly finds himself facing a problem far worse than a messy house, burnt toast, and unwashed PE kits. The best he’s been since his Emmy-nominated turn as an exasperating, heartbreaking, hilarious addict in 2018 miniseries Patrick Melrose, Cumberbatch blunders forward with his face frozen in shock... at least until the hot tears come to melt it into agony. Whether it’s dealing with other parents’ sympathy, having to find it in himself to “do the voices” when reading a bedtime story, or enduring the tough-love avian interloper that nicknames him, mockingly, ‘Sad Dad’, he tackles it with fierce commitment.

It’s a shame, then, that everything around him falls short of his gold standard. Character development is an issue, with the two sons wholly interchangeable and the deceased wife/mother (Claire Cartwright, partially seen in flashbacks) proving only a cipher. Sad Dad relied on her for “everything”, he insists, but little about their (imbalanced, fractured?) relationship is explained or explored. There’s a similar lack of specificity applied to establishing our protagonist’s profession as a graphic novelist, a career that was only chosen, you suspect, to allow for scenes of him obsessively hunching over sketches of crows.

Neither detailed enough to satisfy as gut-wrenching drama or disturbing enough to work as a horror movie, The Thing With Feathers will likely leave viewers confused rather than unnerved, and mildly moved when they should be devastated