The Thing With Feathers review – a well-intentioned adaptation of Max Porter’s novella about grief | film

TIt’s a painful film in both the right and wrong ways. I found something unconvincing and fundamentally unhelpful about the innovative, high-concept depiction of grief. Adapted by writer-director Dylan Southern from Max Porter’s novel “Sadness Is the Thing with Feathers,” the film stars Benedict Cumberbatch who delivers a sincere, well-intentioned performance as a children’s author and graphic novelist. Living a middle-class life in London, he is suddenly a widower; One of the film’s off-target qualities is its refusal to specify the cause of death or even to clearly show us what his wife looked like, which in real life would be unbearably vivid facts. Sam Spruell plays a quietly sympathetic role as Cumberbatch’s brother.

Left to care for his two young sons, he succumbs to a kind of breakdown, a hallucination of a giant nightmarish crow, which the boys can also sense after a while. The crow is wryly voiced by David Thewlis, and resembles the Ted-Hughes-ish illustrations Cumberbatch was working on. He mercilessly mocks and ridicules the pain of his “sorrowful father”; While everyone is walking on eggshells around him, potentially making matters worse, the monstrous crow digs its beak into his psychological wound.

The film contains some clichés: the misguided, intrusive, cartoonish gesture of sympathy by a mother at the school gate, and the solitary push of a trolley around a supermarket that turns into a bad dream. The death totem crow isn’t exactly a cliche, though it does remind me of Daina O Pusic’s relatively unsatisfying Tuesday, which introduced the giant parrot as a symbol of death. But this special-effects crow is, to me, too believable either as a symbol of grief or as a radically therapeutic way to challenge or work through it, and the film itself is too stark and sensitive in taste to be considered a horror film. Quite simply: when the crow is off the screen, the drama begins to engage and influence. Once the crow is there, the film feels self-aware.