The Thing with Feathers Review

This review is based on a screening at the 2025 Sundnace Film Festival.

A horror movie taking place in the shadow of its central metaphor, The Thing with Feathers adapts a poetic novella steeped in maudlin black comedy into a 104-minute slog. While it boasts a strong central performance from Benedict Cumberbatch as a grieving father, it also severely misuses the actor’s skillset. But that’s just the most noticeable of its many major problems.

The film begins with Cumberbatch’s unnamed character comforting his two elementary-school-aged sons (played by siblings Richard and Henry Boxall) after their mother’s funeral. The sudden loss of his spouse sends him into a tailspin faster than he can pick up the pieces of their lives, and his grief eventually manifests as a giant, humanoid crow. (The thing with feathers in the Emily Dickinson-indebted title of the source material.) Embodied by Eric Lampaert and voiced by David Thewlis, the immaculately designed creature torments Cumberbatch’s widower at night with frank barbs about his failures.

Director Dylan Southern has a keen eye for individual moments, but they often fail to coalesce into a satisfying whole. Scenes that flash back to the father discovering his wife’s body create the sense that the past and the present are unfolding at once via matching movements and framing – yanking bygone trauma into the here and now. However, these subtle emotional ripples are quickly cast aside in favor of rote jump scares born of disconnected dream sequences. Whenever the giant crow rears its head in the family’s apartment, it’s presented in oddly matter-of-fact fashion, allowing for few instances of reaction or realization as its presence sets in. The bird is an astonishing creation, but the way it’s shot and edited makes little impact.

The father in Porter’s story was an academic, but here he’s a gothic comic artist who gets lost in his sketches of black, feathery creatures, which more directly connects the dots between his coping mechanism and the way his grief takes hold. However, the crow ends up fulfilling the opposite function of what’s intended: While it appears at inopportune moments, as something that must be confronted no matter what, its arrival robs the film of all weight and tension. On paper, it’s meant to be an antenna for the family’s sorrow. In practice, it’s a distraction from it – no matter how many verbose explanations of its own purpose and meaning Thewlis delivers.

As the film goes on, switching narrators and points of-view in segmented chapters, Southern’s visual approach becomes increasingly ill-fitting for Cumberbatch’s presence. Every actor in the film (especially the young Boxall boys) performs in a tremendously natural fashion, which cinematographer Ben Fordesman echoes through his free-flowing camera. However, Cumberbatch’s presence sticks out sorely, perhaps through no fault of his own. He’s utterly emotionally committed, but his movement and posture in each scene feels too rhythmically calculated for a film unwilling to match an approach perhaps better suited for an expressionistic form of theater like Noh or kabuki. In short: The Thing with Feathers doesn’t know how to contain him. Opposite the Boxalls, Cumberbatch’s animalistic transformations feel at worst comedic, and at best, severely out of place.

The Thing with Feathers wears its underlying meanings on its sleeve, but for a story that unravels slowly, that’s hardly a good thing. Its messages and motifs are made crystal clear early on, after which it spends the vast majority of its runtime – which, in spite of its slightness, still feels like an eternity – retracing its steps and repeating itself while adding few new dimensions. Meanwhile, it acts as a reminder of other, better films (like The Babadook) which have executed similar concepts with far more finesse.