Benedict Cumberbatch Cries to a Giant Bird in His Latest Movie
PARK CITY, Utah—Grief is a winged beast that squawks and mocks the living in The Thing with Feathers, the story of a widower struggling to cope with the recent death of his beloved wife while being pestered by a giant talking crow.
Benedict Cumberbatch’s second straight performance as a “sad, mad dad” who converses with imaginary beings following last year’s Netflix limited Eric, Dylan Southern’s adaptation of Max Porter’s 2015 novella—his first fictional feature following a collection of music-centric documentaries—is an excruciatingly literal affair, not to mention a repetitive one, spinning in circles to dizzying, and ever-diminishing, ends.
Inhabiting a liminal space between genres where jump scares, hallucinations, and therapy sessions clumsily coexist, this Sundance Film Festival selection swings, sways, and lurches about with great commotion. Ultimately, however, it’s all creature-feature sound and fury signifying nothing—save, that is, for the notion that, contrary to conventional wisdom, grief only has one monotonous stage.
Cumberbatch’s unnamed Dad is a graphic artist who’s a weepy, shell-shocked mess over his wife’s passing. Try as he might, he can barely hold it together around his sons (Richard and Henry Boxall), who factor prominently in The Thing with Feathers but exhibit not a single defining trait except for the elder boy’s eventual rage at his father for being a dismal parent.
In the aftermath of the funeral, Dad does his best to carry out the duties his spouse previously handled, including preparing breakfast for the kids and properly outfitting them for, and walking them to, elementary school. In these initial passages, Southern’s film pinpoints the difficulty of assuming previously foreign household and familial roles and, also, the pain of doing so, given that in this case, it serves to remind Cumberbatch’s paterfamilias of what he’s lost.
Dad’s misery isn’t alleviated by visiting with his concerned brother Paul (Sam Spruell), smoking weed in his living room, or sitting down with his therapist, who advises him to maintain routines with, and express his sorrow around, his children. Instead, Dad stares forlornly into space and sketches madly at his work table, creating images defined by sharp, violent black lines and human-avian hybrids.
Shortly thereafter, he begins hearing a growling voice (David Thewlis) that taunts and berates him. As he soon learns, it belongs to Crow, a towering birdman whose mouth doesn’t move when he speaks and whose long fingers scratch the walls and caress the skin. Crow is Dad’s graphic-novel protagonist come to malevolent life, and the sneering, cackling manifestation of the man’s anguish, goading, ridiculing, and haunting him wherever he goes.
Crow looks magnificent, and when not drowned out by dull cacophony, Thewlis’ vocal turn is suitably snide and sinister. Yet the monster’s representative nature is obvious and simplistic from its first appearance, and its eagerness to torment Dad plays out in sub-horror movie fashion, as when he stalks the artist in a grocery store. A later Dad freak-out in which he writhes in tune with Crow, who simultaneously treats the man like a puppet, proves a memorable vision of grief’s capacity to distort, manipulate, and torture. After that, unfortunately, The Thing with Feathers has definitively made its point, meaning its remainder is spent rehashing its lone idea in less interesting ways.
Although it’s split into chapters named for their ostensible focus (Dad, Crow, Kids, etc.), the film doesn’t really afford multiple perspectives on its pandemonium; the best it does in that regard is have the younger boy explain, in his segment’s narration, that his brother got angrier and angrier at his always-woeful “new dad.”
The Thing with Feathers erases the line between the real and the unreal, its tale taking place in a dreamscape of terrors and illusions, most of them the byproduct of Dad’s distressed mind. An attempt at scary psychodrama, it boasts a few loud-noise shocks to the system and almost no insight into its adult or adolescent protagonists, all of whom are two-dimensional devices designed to impart pedestrian things about sadness, loneliness, fear, and wrath.
As Dad’s sanity frays, Crow’s violence intensifies against the man and his progeny. Still, The Thing with Feathers’ helter-skelter plotting means that no scene feels directly connected to the one preceding or following it. It’s all a jumble of hazy madness, and after Dad’s shrink opines that there’s a difference between grief and despair, Dad is tempted to open the door to a demon that takes many shapes (including Dad’s wife), and is then viciously clawed by the unholy fiend.
Once Crow shows up to save Dad from this Big Bad, things go from transparent to ham-fisted, sabotaging a Cumberbatch effort that, no matter its uniformity, conveys a potent sense of his character coming apart at the seams, and is leaps and bounds more transfixing than the performances of his fully grown and pint-sized co-stars.
Because it articulates everything it wants to within its first 30 minutes, The Thing with Feathers has nowhere to go, and much of its later action feels at once chaotic and listless. Coming to terms with tragedy and the destructive feelings it begets is Dad’s destiny. Yet since the proceedings are largely symbolic, there’s no emotional impact to the characters’ quest for healing and peace.
Southern skillfully alternates between shooting Cumberbatch in tight close-ups that magnify his desolation and master shots in which he’s framed by hallways and windows to suggest his (figurative) imprisonment. Less successful are the numerous sights of Dad lying in bed and cawing like his avian persecutor, as well as a score (by Zebedee Budworth) that’s insistent and intrusive to a fault.
Dad finally manages to transform Crow from an adversary into a protector, recognizing that grief isn’t something to defeat but, rather, to accept. By that juncture, however, The Thing with Feathers has more than worn out its welcome. Grappling with death can be akin to both a battle and a nightmare, and the film doesn’t treat that onerous process lightly. On the contrary, it’s a deadly self-serious affair, even though its conceit begs for a healthy dose of mordant humor. Cumberbatch’s commitment notwithstanding, its heavy-handed portrait of despondency and resilience is for the birds.