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‘The Thing with Feathers’ Review: Benedict Cumberbatch Plays a Widowed Father in a Movie That’s Overly Literal About Turning Grief into — Yes — an Oversize Crow
Dylan Southern's movie is deadeningly pretentious, even as its title character looms up like something out of a megaplex horror film.
In “ The Thing with Feathers,” Benedict Cumberbatch plays a London creator of graphic novels who, quite suddenly, finds himself a widower (his beloved wife collapsed on the kitchen floor and died). For just as Cumberbatch and his two boys, who are also never named (yes, it’s that kind of movie), are contending with this intrusive, cawing, wing-shuffling feathered foe, there’s an even more majestic menace on hand: an eight-foot tall giant crow, known as… Crow, who speaks, courtesy of the actor David Thewlis, in a voice of sinister British portent, as if he were the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh crossed with Edgar Allen Poe’s Raven saying “Nevermore!” He says things like “Good morning, English widower! Written and directed by Dylan Southern, who based it on Max Porter’s 2015 novella “Grief is the Things with Feathers,” the film is quite taken with its own ambition, which it signifies visually, with a nearly square aspect ratio and images of burnished gloom.
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