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‘The Thing With Feathers’ Review: Benedict Cumberbatch Fights His Dark Side In A Powerful Portrayal Of Grief – Sundance Film Festival

‘The Thing With Feathers’ review: Benedict Cumberbatch fights his dark side in a powerful portrayal of grief – Sundance Film Festival

Crows rustle in Dylan Southern’s fiction feature debut, the haunting story of a middle-aged man coming to terms with the sudden and unexpected death of his wife, the mother of his two boys. His output is alluded to in the film’s atmospheric credit sequence, in which a restless, scratchy charcoal pencil attacks white paper, the claustrophobia of which is intensified by the director’s intimate use of Academy ratio. This all builds to an impressive study of self-implosion, and Dad’s mental state, while delicately handled, will be identifiable to anyone even remotely adjacent to such a seismic loss: His unwillingness to see visitors, his inability to take phone calls, and his refusal to accept reality (in a heart-wrenching and beautifully subtle touch, his late wife’s face is either never seen or blurred, a devastating evocation of bereavement).

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