Film Review: 'The Thing with Feathers' a Pitch-Black Blend of Horror and Family Drama

Holy crow! This movie will beat the stuffing out of you

Writer-director Dylan Southern is known for his documentaries and music videos. With a background like that, he’ll have developed an eye, a style, a sense for finding the solid core of a subject, and a certain touch in the editing room. All those things are present in his adaptation of “Grief is the Thing with Feathers,” a short novel by Max Porter that tells a tale of familial loss and mourning from three perspectives: That of “Dad” (Benedict Cumberbatch); that of his two young sons (twins Richard and Henry Boxall play the boys, who, in the film, are a year apart in age); and “Crow,” embodied in the film as a towering half-man, half-bird figure with requisite black beak and wings, but also long, bony, monster-fingered hands outfitted with talon-like nails. As a symbol of grief, he’s well-suited, and this film presents us with grief of a particularly bleak sort: Mom has committed suicide, and Dad is trying to tend his sons while doing his best not to go to absolute pieces.

(Benedict Cumberbatch in The Thing with Feathers. Briarcliff Entertainment)

That’s a tough job, considering that Crow seems intent on ripping Dad into strips of carrion jerky. We glimpse Crow in various innocuous ways early one, as a bird slams into Dad’s window for a jump scare, and as the camera surveys Dad’s avian creations. (He’s a cartoonist working on a graphic novel.) Crow seeps into Dad’s nightmares, first as a swooping black blur speeding out of nighttime shadows to strafe him. Soon enough, though, Crow is revealed as a brutal interlocutor who mocks Dad’s grief, shames his rage, and tosses him about like a rag doll. Blood and ink alike flow in these scenes, and Crow’s assaults — verbal, physical, emotional — are relentless. But are they real? The boys seem to think so, tuning into Dad’s escalating visions of the gigantic creature and ending up a bit bloodied themselves.

All of this functions as a metaphor for the way grief growls from the shadows and strikes out of the blue. In the mind’s movie house, this would all be one thing; but translated to the actual big screen? That process pins the images down and forces them to take the concrete form of the director’s interpretation, and they might not work for everyone. While Crow is effectively suggested with some quick-cutting and clever lighting — and, at one point, shown dressed up in a ghost costume — there are moments when we see too much. Even from a distance, Crow, when not swaddled in shadow or suggested through camerawork and David Thewlis’ gutteral, raspy voice work, looks rubbish.

There are also moments when too much is too much. Southern offers a fourth perspective in his treatment of the book, and there’s a boss battle between mythic figures that resembles a shadow puppet play. More interesting are the intimations of Dad’s internal struggle, which are as disorienting to us as to himself. Deep grief drifts into deep confusion at times, but Southern need not apologize for that; bereavement is its own sort of horror movie, and losing one’s bearings is part of the process.

The Thing with Feathers premieres in theaters November 28.