Grief is many things, uniquely indescribable and specific to us all. For British author Max Porter, in his lauded, no-bullshit, deeply personal novella, it’s a thing with feathers. Specifically, a giant, hulking, wheezing crow ready to read your inner pain to filth as clichéd, unoriginal.
In his formidable debut feature, director Dylan Southern adapts Porter’s book into a moving drama that gnaws on loss through the hallmarks of horror. It’s by no means the first film to lean on terror to explore grief — Pet Sematary, The Babadook, Talk to Me, the list is long. However, with a raw, anguished performance by Benedict Cumberbatch and production design that makes walls literally bleed ink, The Thing with Feathers will pluck at your heartstrings while threatening to devour them.
And for a film involving a massive talking bird, it’s a shockingly accurate depiction of bereavement.
The Thing with Feathers channels the horror and grit of Max Porter’s book.
Credit: BFI London Film Festival
Using magical realism to convey the inexplicability of loss, Porter’s novella practically caws to be visualised — and Southern’s adaptation could not be more aware of this.
The plot is human and simple: An illustrator and his two young sons are faced with life after their beloved matriarch suddenly dies. Characters in the story do not have names beyond their proper nouns — Dad, Boys, Mum — and where the book uses a polyphonic perspective structure, the film concentrates on one viewpoint per act for a fluid arc. Cumberbatch is Dad, now “Sad Dad,” who privately struggles while keeping his two young Boys (twins Richard and Henry Boxall) fed, bathed, and picked up from school at the very least. However, one dark and stormy night, a colossal, gruff-voiced Crow descends upon this house of mourning, as the personification of grief (hence the title). And he refuses to leave “until you don’t need me anymore,” which is… when?
Where Porter’s writing most brightly shines through Southern’s film is in this crucial character of Crow (impeccably voiced by David Thewlis). An onyx-winged, glossy-eyed creature of seemingly eternal origin, Crow is an otherworldly, rasping presence whose status as friend or foe remains in constant flux.
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Behind the film’s bold creature design and animatronics, and Eric Lampaert’s physical performance, Thewlis is nothing short of marvellous as the voice of Crow. Both terrifying and hilarious, the lugubrious creature “finds humans incredibly dull except when grieving,” and persists in mocking “Guardian-reading” Dad when he’s not completely terrorising him (and us) with jump scares. Crow’s croaking dialogue is predominantly a splintered and spat-out stream of consciousness, freely associated words making strange sense through the lens of death and loss. The character is much more crass and explicit in his ramblings in the novella, with the film version sticking to more PG utterances, but George Cragg’s razor-sharp editing echoes Porter’s fragmented writing style.
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The film’s surrealist sequences between Crow and Dad are its strongest, with one scene using horror elements to see Cumberbatch pursued by his avian assailant through a regular ol’ supermarket. Probably one of the best scenes sees Dad’s guard completely down while being mocked by Crow in his own living room, as the feathered presence ditches Dad’s “white widower music” for a more gravelly Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. The camera circles the two in a raw, urgent dance, and Cumberbatch lets it all go.
What’s undeniably missing from the film is Porter’s inescapable olfactory descriptions, with the novella so descriptive you can practically smell the “rich smell of decay” and “sweet furry stink” off the pages. It’s a tough ask of filmmakers to convey scents through the screen, and we get glimmers of it — Dad’s brother Paul commenting on the “Tracey Emin’s kitchen” state of the house, for one. But where the film does one-up the book is in the pure talent of Cumberbatch.
The Thing with Feathers is as much a film about grief as it is about fatherhood.
Credit: BFI London Film Festival
While The Thing with Feathers‘ primary emotional theme is grief, the film’s exploration of fatherhood is just as multifaceted, brutal, and magical. Dad and the Boys are surrounded by reminders of Mum, in drawers, in wardrobes, in splintered memories, and Dad becomes instantly aware of how much he relied on his wife for “everything.” As the Boys begin to act out in their own young grief, tension in their now-silent house reaches a boiling point for the forever-changed trio.
In the novella, which Porter wrote after the death of his father, the author writes of such specific aspects of grief they’re frankly staggering. He describes Dad as a “trader in clichés of gratitude,” a facade which Southern softens for the film but makes plain through a few scenes. Deleting the voicemails of concerned friends like Amanda (Vinette Robinson), family members like his brother Paul (Sam Spruell), and other — as Porter dubs them — “orbiting grievers,” Cumberbatch’s Dad doesn’t allow himself to grieve in front of others, especially the Boys, instead burying his anguish until they’re tucked up in bed.
Constantly surrounded by his new solo-parenting reality, Dad isn’t as buoyed by imagination as the Boys are. Together, these two build “worlds full of life, full of possibility” while they’re forced to process something not even their go-to grown-up is able to understand. Spiralling through torment and hinging on surrendering to total despair, Dad begins to replicate Crow-like behaviour, with vocal “krrraaa!”s and agitated movements that Cumberbatch embodies convincingly. Giving it everything he’s got, the actor undergoes a full-bodied emotional upheaval throughout the film, unsuccessfully attempting to “keep things as normal as possible” for the Boys and always accompanied by the looming presence of Crow.
The Thing with Feathers is a barrage of wild sound and production design.
Credit: BFI London Film Festival
The power of art to convey what words cannot runs through the whole film, taking on a literal presence. Dad’s profession is a comic illustrator, with his drawing style a violent array of charcoal and ink drawings sketched with urgency and desperation. Southern extends this artistic form off the page and down the walls of the house, which results in some of the film’s most striking visual sequences.
Suzie Davies’ impeccable production design moves Dad and the Boys’ melancholy home through a sense of ruin and abandonment, of dark creative impulses leading to neglect. Blood and ink become one in some genuinely brutal scenes. Paired with this is an absolutely maddening triumph of abrasive foley work, with sound designer Joakim Sundström crafting visceral dread (and many a jump scare) through the omnipresent flurry of flapping wings, incessant cawing, scratching charcoal sticks. All this functions alongside Dad’s soundtrack of everyday parenting, of scraped burnt toast, metal spoons clanging on ceramic bowls, and juvenile resistance. It’s all punctuated by Zebedee Budworth’s melancholy score of plucked staccato strings and haunting a capella, and the effect is all-consuming.
It’s this constant flux between reality and fantasy that both Porter’s novella and Southern’s adaptation obsess over, and it’s a strangely accurate representation of just how surreal and, well, fucked-up daily existence can be after a sudden loss. Stranger than fiction is the order of the day, every day, and confronting such pain can feel like being haunted by a giant winged geezer. You just learn to live with Crow.
The Thing with Feathers was reviewed out of BFI London Film Festival, where it is showing Oct. 11 and 12. The film will release in UK cinemas on Nov. 7 and U.S. cinemas Nov. 28.