Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Dylan Southern
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, David Thewlis, Richard Boxall, Henry Boxall, Eric Lampaert, Vinette Robinson, Sam Spruell
You wait your whole life for a movie in which a grief-stricken middle class Londoner is visited by a giant talking bird and then two come along at once. 2024 gave us Tuesday, which saw Julia Louis-Dreyfus play the mother of a terminally ill teen who is visited by Death in the form of a giant talking Macaw. Now The Thing with Feathers sees Benedict Cumberbatch play a father of two boys who hallucinates a giant crow as he struggles to come to terms with the recent passing of his wife. Both films have the same problem: the magic realism plays like a showy gimmick that distracts from what might have been an engaging exploration of grief were the drama more grounded.
Written and directed by David Southern, The Thing with Feathers is adapted from a 2015 novella by the writer Max Porter. It was previously adapted as an acclaimed stage play with no less than Cillian Murphy in the lead role. Everything about Southern's overblown and hokey adaptation suggests that this is a story that belongs on the stage, limited to two characters. Cumberbatch's valiant but ineffectual performance also makes us wonder how better suited Murphy might have been to the role.
Credited only as "Dad", Cumberbatch plays a graphic novelist who finds himself in a spiral of despair after his wife's death. He tries his best to be a good father, but he loses his temper at every little thing his boys do to annoy him, and he realises how much of a role his wife played in their upbringing. Dad is working on a graphic novel involving charcoal crows, and his creation manifests itself as a towering crow voiced by David Thewlis in a thick Northern English accent. Seeing the crow everywhere, Dad sends his boys away to stay with his brother (Sam Spruell) as he fears his mental well-being might put them at risk. This leaves him alone and exposed to the increasing malevolence of the crow.
The best movies about grief to come along this century are Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room and Johannes Nyholm's Koko-di Koko-da. The former opted for realism, focussing intently on the attempts of an everyman to get over his son's sudden death, with Moretti allowing himself to take centre stage in the lead role. The latter employed Scandinavian folk-horror and a Groundhog Day-esque time loop narrative to embody the cycle of grief. The Thing with Feathers isn't as grounded as The Son's Room, nor is it as fantastical as Koko-di Koko-da; it exists somewhere in between realism and magic-realism, but the two styles clash rather than compliment each other.
There is the odd brief moment when the film settles down and focusses on its humans and their pain. The most touching scene sees Dad visit his in-laws and leaf through a family photo album with his late wife's mother (Lesley Molony), both trying their best to maintain a stiff upper lip when they really want to collapse in tears. But such quiet moments are rare, as this is a film that prefers to cudgel us over the head with its central gimmick, leading to a bizarrely misjudged climax that features the sort of CG theatrics you might expect of a Marvel movie.
It's unclear if Southern is aiming for the affirming tone of something like A Monster Calls or something darker like The Babadook. The details of how Dad's wife passed away are left ambiguous, which has the disastrous effect of causing us to wonder if we're set for a dark twist that reveals Dad as her murderer. Cumberbatch seems uncomfortable and self-conscious in the role; you can imagine him turning to his director at the end of every take and asking "was that enough grief?"
The Thing with Feathers is in UK/ROI cinemas from November 21st.
