“The Thing With Feathers”

“The Thing with Feathers” is a suffocating and strange exploration of grief that traps its characters (and its audience) within the narrow confines of mourning and madness. Adapted from Max Porter’s acclaimed novel “Grief Is the Thing with Feathers,” the film translates the book’s poetic abstraction into a visual language of claustrophobia and psychological unease. While director Dylan Southern doesn’t always find success by leaning on a horror angle, his creative choices keep things interesting.

Shot in a constricted aspect ratio with relentlessly tight framing, the film rarely lets you breathe. Every hallway feels too narrow and every room too crowded, as if the air itself were weighted with the family’s sorrow. Watching this film is an experience that’s not exactly pleasant, especially as Southern leans on his visual expression of the suffocating interior world of a father (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his two young sons (Richard Boxall, Henry Boxall) reeling from the sudden death of his wife.

Cumberbatch delivers a reliably strong performance as the grieving father. His descent into disorientation and despair is both harrowing and painfully believable as he captures the brittleness of a man trying to hold himself together for his family while slowly fracturing under the weight of his own loss. His performance sometimes feels at odds with the film’s more surreal and horror-inflected moments, but anyone who has experienced grief will find him so relatable.

Walking a line between metaphor and menace, the thing with feathers manifests as a towering, anthropomorphic crow that haunts the family’s apartment. Initially terrifying, the crow feels like a visitation from the father’s worst fears, a grotesque embodiment of grief itself. As the story unfolds, the crow’s role shifts into a psychological reckoning. The creature becomes a guide that eventually forces the family to confront their pain rather than repress it.

This is where the film takes its biggest risk. The horror elements are definitely visually striking with some terrifying imagery, but they do sometimes clash with the intimate emotional realism of the family’s story. The film’s ambition to merge genres doesn’t always work, and certain sequences feel more conceptually clever than emotionally resonant. No matter what, you have to admire the audacity.

Dark and ambitious, “The Thing With Feathers” aims to tell a familiar story about a descent into madness following trauma in a fresh and unsettling way.

By: Louisa Moore