The Thing With Feathers: Benedict Cumberbatch Anchors a Muddled Fable on Grief

Film Reviews

Sundance Film Review: The Thing with Feathers
Director: Dylan Southern
Lobo Films, LB Entertainment, Align
Premiere: 01.25

Emily Dickinson once wrote that “hope is the thing with feathers.” Author Max Porter sees it differently, as demonstrated by his 2015 novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, upon which this film is based. Drawing inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe, the story sees a man navigating the five stages of grief through interactions and conversations with a massive crow. It’s not exactly an easy premise to base a film on, though The Thing With Feathers does an admirable job adapting its source material.

We meet an illustrator (Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock, Doctor Strange) who is struggling to maintain his professional life while raising his two sons alone after his wife’s death. To numb the pain, he buries himself in his work, drawing dark and often disturbing works involving dead bodies and crows. One night he finds himself visited by a massive, speaking crow, which follows him constantly, always reminding him of his late wife and what he has lost. Over time, through various arguments with the beast, the man finds he cannot fight against the crow and must learn to live with it. It’s an effective, if quite blunt, depiction of the stages of grief and how they affect one’s personal life — from arguing with your kids to turning your house into a mess.

The Thing With Feathers would have fallen flat on its face without a strong central performance, and thankfully, the film finds a great match in Cumberbatch. He rides the various tonal and emotional shifts with aplomb and shares great chemistry with the adorable real-life brothers Richard and Henry Boxall, who play his sons. It’s easy to buy into their family dynamic from the get-go.

From a production standpoint, The Thing with Feathers is impressively stylish. The film’s 4:3 aspect ratio and reliance on shallow depth-of-field create an intimate, and sometimes claustrophobic, atmosphere that immediately draws you in. The depiction of The Crow is smartly executed as well, employing a giant Jim Henson-esque puppet that is equal parts terrifying and adorable. It helps that David Thewlis (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) provides the creature with his steely cool voice (even if much of his dialogue is incomprehensible jabbering).

Though its premise is highly inventive, the film does often fall into typical “single father” tropes, and even goes so far as to have The Crow tell Cumberbatch, “You’re such a cliché,” which feels like a cheap way to write off the film’s more thematically derivative elements. The Thing with Feathers also can’t land on a consistent tone, running the full gamut from jump-scare heavy horror to heartstring-plucking melodrama. While I don’t always mind a tonally diverse film, The Thing With Feathers’ transitions between moods can be quite jarring, blunting the impact of some of the more dramatic moments.

But even with its rough edges and blatant symbolism, The Thing with Feathers is deeply earnest. Admittedly, I shed tears a few times. You’d have to be heartless not to feel it to some degree, and that’s because the main themes it touches on are very universal. To love is to lose, and to lose is to grieve. As one character succinctly puts it, “You need to learn the difference between grief and despair.” Even if your grief takes the form of an eight foot, anthropomorphic crow, you’ll eventually learn to live with it. —Seth Turek

Read more of SLUG’s coverage of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.