The Thing With Feathers review – simplistic self-help cinema

Gluttons for emotional punishment would do well to seek out Dylan Southern’s The Thing with Feathers, an ickily-stylised screen adaptation of Max Porter’s hit 2019 novel ​‘Grief is a Thing with Feathers’. It’s telling that they’ve removed the marketing turn-off term ​“grief” from the title, but the fact is, you’d need to have a media literacy score of minus 3000 to not get what this film is selling, as a ghostly humanoid crow verbally harangues and demeans a father and his two kids in the direct wake of their wife/mother’s sudden death. 

And that grief is laid on with an over-sized trowel as we have Benedict Cumberbatch doing wall-to-wall ugly crying as a cartoonist (don’t say ​“graphic novelist,” as apparently it sounds wanky) who’s forced to face up to his manifold deficiencies as a primary carer and is presented (quite wankily) as the archetype ​“Dad”. His two young ​“Boys” (Richard and Henry Boxall) can’t really comprehend the gravity of the situation, and there’s an instant and moving clash when Dad realises that there’s little common understanding in the house at this moment of sublime rupture.

During the long, boozy nights of contemplation and worry that the world can never be the same again, Dad is jolted out of his reverie by the loud knock of a bird Kamikaze-diving into the window (à la Hitchcock’s The Birds), clearly trying to invade the house and, eventually, get into the heads of all the inhabitants. Eventually, all this malevolent wildlife manifests as Crow, a hunched, lifesized crow voiced by David Thewlis who’s channeling an even more aggressive, irritating and comically Northern version of his character Johnny from Naked. The film is split into chapters which detail how Dad and the Boys interact with Crow and how, through Crow’s oppressive rantings, everyone is eventually dragged towards some semblance of comprehension and peace.

Where the story works in the pages of the novel as a literary device that can be imagined by the reader, presenting a screen version with an actual physical presence completely drains any nuance from the story. Doing it this way somehow feels like the easy way out, both diluting and formalising a complex process of healing that is likely going to be different for everyone who experiences it. The film so desperately wants you to shed tears alongside its crestfallen protagonists, yet the veneer of toughness (which occasionally comes across as horror-adjacent) covers a heart that is wholly sentimental.

Another aspect that sticks in the craw is the idea that this occurrence allows Dad to hover haughtily above his peers and acquaintances, and there are numerous awkward scenes of people offering to help as Cumberbatch demures, wondering how anyone could even begin to fathom his dismal headspace. Empathy and civility are cynically brushed off as performative and self-soothing, as if the film wants you only to believe in the restorative methods that it’s selling. There’s a few decent performances in the mix (the kids especially), and Cumberbatch goes all-in (and then some) on the concept, but otherwise this flails as saccharine self-help cinema without any real sense of authentic human behaviour.