Writer and Director: Dylan Southern
Max Porter’s 2015 novel about grief is given a big screen adaptation with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role. It follows a highly successful stage version with Cillian Murphy that played at the Barbican in London in 2019 which found a moving intensity and an immersive magical-realism meets horror tone as a widowed father becomes increasingly overwhelmed by despair. Dylan Southern’s movie certainly ups the scares in its depiction of shattered mental health as the character’s fears take on a physical form, yet while the suffocating restrictions of Porter’s original are well realised, The Thing with Feathers keeps the audience on the outside of the father’s emotional collapse.
When his wife dies suddenly, a man is left to care for his two young boys alone, struggling to maintain any kind of routine or order. As the days only get harder, Dad starts to hear the voice of a crow that soon becomes a permanent feature in the family’s life. Unable to keep track of time or the difference between reality and nightmares, Dad cannot be the father his children need, tumbling further into his own grief.
Southern’s film relocates the action to an urban area, an ordinary street within which complicated emotional and existential themes play out behind the closed door of the small flat that the man and his children inhabit. And the initial scene-setting is very well managed, the tensions and pressure Dad is experiencing in a chaotic house where his active boys have more energy than he can cope with and even breakfast is an ordeal. With dirty dishes, toys and piles of unwashed clothes everywhere, Suzie Davies’ design suggests a household on the brink which makes sense of what follows.
The arrival of Crow (David Thewlis) borrows horror movie tropes, offering plenty of shadowy rooms lit only by streetlamps outside, sinister noises and flashing cuts to some kind of intrusive creature, the eeriness amplified by tense music. As ever in these scenarios, the man hearing strange noises in the night proceeds to investigate in the dark rather than turning on the lights – it maintains the mood perhaps but it is a ridiculous cliché for a man protecting two children but then energy bills have been unreasonable for a long time. It’s rather a shame when the audience see Crow in full who looks like a thin man wearing a costume that is more alien than avian, and the theatre version did better to let this be a voice in Dad’s head and a series of illustrations instead of a character on Sesame Street Lates.
Southern retains Porter’s multi-character perspectives seeing different chapters from various points of view, most effectively the two boys who rather sadly describe the replacement of their kind, fun father with a mean alternative that they barely recognise. Cumberbatch gives a decent performance as someone dislocated by loss and adrift in his own fragile mind but the desperate sadness of it never really connects with the audience. All the pieces are there but their impact is muffled so we don’t feel the ache as strongly as last year’s tale of grief at the London Film Festival, All of Us Strangers.
It is nice to see Sam Spruell playing a nice character for a change, although both he and Vinette Robinson are underused, while it is Richard Boxall and Henry Boxall as the bewildered sons who steal the film. A good attempt to adapt a complex book about how easily grief unmoors us, but the power of Porter’s story and the theatre adaptation is in the wild drama of one man’s imagination and the terror of being unable to find your way back.
The Thing with Feathers is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
