Benedict Cumberbatch delivers a sincere performance in The Thing With Feathers, a new film adaptation that grapples with the complex subject of loss, yet ultimately fails to capture the raw power of its source material.
A Well-Intentioned Adaptation
Adapted by writer-director Dylan Southern from Max Porter's acclaimed novella, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, the film stars Cumberbatch as a London-based children's author and graphic novelist. His middle-class life is shattered when he is suddenly widowed, left alone to care for his two young boys.
The film intentionally avoids specifying the cause of his wife's death and refrains from showing her face clearly, a creative choice that the original review found to be off-target, arguing that such details would be painfully vivid in reality. Sam Spruell appears in a quietly sympathetic role as Cumberbatch's brother.
The Problematic Crow
As the grieving father succumbs to a breakdown, he begins to hallucinate a giant, nightmarish crow, a manifestation that his sons eventually sense. Voiced with derision by David Thewlis, the creature resembles the Ted-Hughes-inspired illustrations the protagonist was working on.
This crow ruthlessly mocks his "sad dad" anguish, jabbing its beak into his psychic wounds while others in his life tread carefully around him. However, the film's central symbol is where it stumbles most significantly. The review found the special effects crow to be an unpersuasive symbol of grief, and the film too self-conscious and tasteful to function as a horror movie.
Strengths and Shortcomings
The drama is at its most involving and affecting when the crow is absent from the screen. The film also incorporates some familiar clichés, including a cartoonishly intrusive school-gate mum and a surreal, dream-like solo supermarket trip.
While the death-totem crow is not itself a cliché, it draws unfavourable comparison to the giant macaw in Daina O Pusic's film Tuesday. The crow does not convincingly symbolise grief nor does it offer a radically therapeutic way to challenge or process it.
The Thing With Feathers is now showing in Australia, will be released in the UK on 21 November, and arrives in the US on 28 November.
