The Thing With Feathers Is Shot Down By Its Painfully Literal Metaphor
Benedict Cumberbatch offers up a wild performance in a film that gives us little more than that.
“Grief is the thing with feathers.”
So declares the 2015 novella by Max Porter that follows a grieving widow and his two sons as they’re beset upon by the manifestation of grief, which happens to be a giant talking Crow. It’s an intriguing narrative metaphor that appeared to translate perfectly to the stage — the 2019 stage play adaptation starring Cillian Murphy was met with rave reviews. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work nearly as well on the silver screen.
Directed by Dylan Southern, The Thing With Feathers is a mawkish fantasy drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the nameless father whose wife passes away suddenly, leaving him to care for his two young boys (Richard Boxall and Henry Boxall) on his own. To make matters worse, his grief is so powerful it starts to manifest physically, in the form of a giant talking Crow (voiced by David Thewlis, hamming it up with every line reading). At first, he brushes it off as a result of fatigue and his work bleeding into his subconscious — he’s a comic book artist working on a story about a crow, which he begins to sketch obsessively. But then the Crow starts to taunt and mock him, even physically attacking him until it seems like he’s a man possessed, fighting some unseen force. But it turns out that the Crow is a more benevolent spirit that is keeping at bay something even worse.
The Thing With Feathers is an interesting theatrical exercise — what if grief were a giant Crow that kind of had a bad attitude and beat you up every now and then? — but it isn’t nearly meaty enough to justify a full-length feature film. For the first 20 minutes, the film goes down an intriguing horror route, putting Cumberbatch’s Dad through a Kafka-esque metamorphosis in which his grief is so overwhelming it seems to transform him into a bird-like creature. It’s this part that Cumberbatch seems to revel in — as he furiously sketches pictures of dozens of crows, he starts to squawk and contort his arms, like some kind of terrifying, primal dance. His physicality is impressive, and it’s almost enough to distract from the theatrical silliness of the whole thing. But it’s in the rest of the film’s hamfisted metaphor that Cumberbatch starts to seem a little lost.
Partially to blame is the Crow, who looks like a cartoonishly large mascot that has been through the wringer. He has huge voids for eyes, and bedraggled feathers that looked like they were dipped in tar — all the elements that are ripe for a horror movie monster, including the gravelly, booming voice that Thewlis uses for it. But every time he speaks, he just kind of sounds like an asshole — he’s crude, annoying, and he’s got a terrible sense of humor. The film leans into this, and eventually the Crow loses any sense of menace, eventually morphing into something more akin to a foul-mouthed cartoon sidekick.
The film intercuts back and forth between the present, in which Dad and his two boys try to evade the Crow’s grasp, and the past, when the boys’ mother was alive and the family was happy. But despite Southern’s ambitious attempts at nonlinear storytelling, and the stylistic flourishes with which he takes us from memory to reality, it all can’t help but feel redundant (not to mention a little emotionally manipulative) — like Southern is caught going around in narrative circles. It all results in the viewer feeling every one of the film’s 140 minutes. In fact, by the time the film takes an absurd turn towards cloyingly sentimental, it feels like you’ve been stuck watching this thing for three hours — and not even Benedict Cumberbatch wildly flapping his arms and cawing is enough to make you enjoy it.
In the end, The Thing With Feathers is more metaphor than movie. Despite an impressively dedicated performance from Cumberbatch, who engages in a kind of punk-rock physicality that is way outside of his niche, The Thing With Feathers has nothing new to say about grief or about moving beyond it.
