This assessment relies on a screening on the 2025 Sundnace Film Festival.
A horror film going down within the shadow of its central metaphor, The Thing with Feathers adapts a poetic novella steeped in maudlin black comedy right into a 104-minute slog. While it boasts a powerful central efficiency from Benedict Cumberbatch as a grieving father, it additionally severely misuses the actor’s skillset. But that’s simply probably the most noticeable of its many main issues.
The movie begins with Cumberbatch’s unnamed character comforting his two elementary-school-aged sons (performed by siblings Richard and Henry Boxall) after their mom’s funeral. The sudden lack of his partner sends him right into a tailspin quicker than he can choose up the items of their lives, and his grief finally manifests as a large, humanoid crow. (The factor 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 time with frank barbs about his failures.
Director Dylan Southern has a eager eye for particular person moments, however they usually fail to coalesce right into a satisfying complete. Scenes that flash again to the daddy discovering his spouse’s physique create the sense that the previous and the current are unfolding directly by way of matching actions and framing – yanking bygone trauma into the right here and now. However, these delicate emotional ripples are rapidly forged apart in favor of rote soar scares born of disconnected dream sequences. Whenever the enormous crow rears its head within the household’s house, it’s introduced in oddly matter-of-fact style, permitting for few cases of response or realization as its presence units in. The chook is an astonishing creation, however the way in which it’s shot and edited makes little influence.
The father in Porter’s story was an educational, however right here he is a gothic comedian artist who will get misplaced in his sketches of black, feathery creatures, which extra straight connects the dots between his coping mechanism and the way in which his grief takes maintain. However, the crow finally ends up fulfilling the alternative perform of what’s meant: While it seems at inopportune moments, as one thing that should be confronted it doesn’t matter what, its arrival robs the movie of all weight and stress. On paper, it’s meant to be an antenna for the household’s sorrow. In observe, it’s a distraction from it – regardless of what number of verbose explanations of its personal objective and which means Thewlis delivers.
As the movie goes on, switching narrators and factors of-view in segmented chapters, Southern’s visible method turns into more and more ill-fitting for Cumberbatch’s presence. Every actor within the movie (particularly the younger Boxall boys) performs in a tremendously pure style, which cinematographer Ben Fordesman echoes by means of his free-flowing digicam. However, Cumberbatch’s presence stands proud sorely, maybe by means of no fault of his personal. He’s totally emotionally dedicated, however his motion and posture in every scene feels too rhythmically calculated for a movie unwilling to match an method maybe higher suited to an expressionistic type of theater like Noh or kabuki. In brief: The Thing with Feathers doesn’t know the best way to comprise him. Opposite the Boxalls, Cumberbatch’s animalistic transformations really feel at worst comedic, and at greatest, severely misplaced.
The Thing with Feathers wears its underlying meanings on its sleeve, however for a narrative that unravels slowly, that’s hardly an excellent factor. Its messages and motifs are made crystal clear early on, after which it spends the overwhelming majority of its runtime – which, regardless of its slightness, nonetheless looks like an eternity – retracing its steps and repeating itself whereas including few new dimensions. Meanwhile, it acts as a reminder of different, higher movies (like The Babadook) which have executed related ideas with much more finesse.
