The Thing With Feathers Almost Wastes a Great Benedict Cumberbatch Performance

Not everything has to be a horror movie. Not everything needs to open with jump scares and random inserts of loud incoherent chaos. Yes, if you pretend your film belongs in the horror genre nowadays, you can scare up some good publicity and maybe a wide release, maybe even a plum distribution deal with an A24 or a NEON or a Blumhouse. But what if you also shoot your own movie in the head in the process? In Dylan Southern’s The Thing with Feathers, Benedict Cumberbatch plays a grieving widower struggling, with his two young sons, to handle the recent loss of his wife. A comic book artist with charcoal drawings and figures of birds around his house, he begins having visions of a giant, talking crow who seizes control of his body and profanely mocks his melancholy. The crow, known as Crow, insists it’s there to help. “I won’t leave until you don’t need me anymore,” it insists. But it’s also a giant, scary figure looming in the shadows, with a booming, unreal voice (courtesy of David Thewlis), and sometimes it chases our hero down darkened supermarket corridors. My glib observations about the perils of distribution in the 2020s aside, the idea of grief as an inescapable terrorscape certainly makes emotional and intellectual sense. But watching The Thing with Feathers, we get the distinct sense that it doesn’t know what kind of movie to be.

Whenever the camera focuses on Cumberbatch, however, things clarify. A talented guy with a seductive voice and wonderfully dissonant face, the actor has sometimes struggled to find the right parts: His demeanor tempts people into casting him as oddballs, but really, he’s at his best when he’s playing confused, ordinary men. And here, he’s maybe more confused than ever. He tries to put up a brave front, but his grief consumes him. When the camera fixes on him breaking down in tears after the kids have gone to bed, we see a man who’s lost all control. When Crow begins manipulating him, the father’s flails of protest become discordant dance moves, programmed but alien. He makes bird gestures while he draws, acting out his characters but also maybe letting something peek out from within himself. It’s one of the best, most alive and inventive performances the actor has given.

Unfortunately, the film is even more confused than the character. The father’s experiences with Crow eventually start to feel like a therapy session, a psychological journey through a symbolic landscape that the man must traverse to deal with his pain. That’s certainly interesting, but director Southern still seems intent on shocking us, trying to weave jarring and ultimately tedious horror elements into a tale whose innate emotional power doesn’t need additional pyrotechnics. The film becomes further muddled, almost comically so, with the appearance of another looming, shadowy creature, a Demon that is shot a lot like Crow but is apparently different. Is the confusion intentional? Maybe. Is it necessary? I’m not sure.

The film is based on Max Porter’s novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers, in case you’re wondering what the crow is supposed to represent. (I think the Demon is supposed to represent despair.) I have not read Porter’s novel, but it does not appear to be a horror story in any way, shape, or form. Porter’s protagonist is an academic working on a biography of the poet Ted Hughes, author of the famous Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, written after the death of his wife, the poet Sylvia Plath. Porter’s title, of course, is an allusion to Emily Dickinson’s poem “’Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers.” Introducing his film at Sundance, Southern said that he changed his protagonist’s profession because academia didn’t seem very cinematic, and also because he really liked graphic novels. So, he got rid of the academia and the poetry, which appear to have been fairly important to the novel’s overall effect. He does, however, appear to have added the whole Demon thing. That is certainly a filmmaker’s prerogative — movies need not ever be wholly faithful to their sources — but the resulting genre mélange, uneasy and uninvolving, doesn’t help the story he’s trying to tell. And it comes dangerously close to wasting one of Benedict Cumberbatch’s greatest performances.