The messiness of grief, something most of us know too well, has been given a smoothing effect on screen, an experience so awful and unpleasant made easily, annoyingly palatable. The cliches that have come to define it have become so normalised that we often forget what it’s really like to see the horrible, frightening reality shown to us. On the page, and stage, Max Porter’s novella Grief is the Thing with Feathers was for many, a fantastical yet identifiable story of loss, the tale of a father losing his wife transformed into a dark, magical fable of transformative horror. Its central conceit – a giant crow haunting the aftermath of death – was such a compelling visual that, despite the pitfalls that come with adapting something so beloved, the big screen felt like a natural next step.
In his introduction before the adaptation’s late-night Sundance premiere, writer and director Dylan Southern (whose work has previously focused on music documentaries) informed us that this would be no traditional grief drama, a subgenre one has come to often glumly expect from the festival. This would be something far more unusual.
But The Thing with Feathers, a film that uses the word grief so much already that it was wisely removed from the title, is not as radical as those behind it might like to think. It’s actually surprisingly, sometimes boringly, conventional, not just as a grounded drama of loss but as a metaphorical horror too, a trend that was given a new lease of life with 2014’s The Babadook, which also premiered at Sundance (Benedict Cumberbatch’s father even reads his sons a story involving the similar-sounding tale of the Slavic creature Baba Yaga, a perhaps unwise pre-bedtime choice given its themes). While Jennifer Kent found a way to make her film operate so effectively on both levels, Southern just can’t figure out the right balance. It’s never scary or jolting enough as a horror or as emotionally investing or psychologically insightful as it should be as a drama.
What’s crucially missing is detail, both in the characters themselves and the weight of what they’re going through, red flags all the way up in an overly familiar introductory stretch following the unseen funeral. Cumberbatch’s unnamed Dad is struggling already, forgetting the milk and burning the toast, his late wife having taken on “everything” before she died. While a more traditionally common dynamic that it should be, there’s not much interrogation of this unfair imbalance and what it really means for who the character was and now has to be (bar one flashback to Dad taking out his young sons in the snow in improper attire). There’s nothing lived-in about Southern’s recycled view of Dad’s grief – screaming down the phone, refusing to clean the kitchen, dealing with well-intentioned yet inappropriate offers of support – and also nothing to remember about the anonymously written wife and mother who has gone, described as someone kind who smelled nice.
The arrival of a menacing creature is therefore a desperately needed uplift as Dad starts to lose his grip on reality, faced with a David Thewlis-voiced menace, mocking him as he tries to push his new life on, caring for his two interchangeable sons while working on his latest graphic novel. But there’s no real progress or substance to the confusingly paced relationship, a repetitive cycle of ineffective jump scares and smugly sardonic putdowns that fail to show how Dad is benefitting or changing from this new addition to the family. Like the book, the film is sectioned (Dad, Boys, Crow and Demon) and while a perspective shift seems to follow each time, it soon fades and we’re back in the same, increasingly uninteresting, routine (the arrival of the wonderful Vinette Robinson is also sadly just a brief tease). There’s a proudly absurd streak to many of the scenes (Southern used the word “ridiculous” before the film) with Cumberbatch dancing and fighting with Crow while also taking on elements of his sounds and physicality himself. But it all feels a little dated, not as anarchic or as twisted as it’s presented as, and somehow far less effective than something that’s far less pretentious like Venom. Like Tom Hardy in those films, Cumberbatch is admirably committed yet the rather embarrassing silliness he’s forced into can’t be pulled off, especially since it remains unclear what or who Crow really is and wants, a character as underwritten as Dad. Cumberbatch’s performance is certainly all-in but restricted by the limited nature of the script – cry, scream, scribble, repeat – and so he’s left as visibly exhausted as we are.
What one hopes for in a film about something so utterly terrible is that sink of sadness to set in, the pang that makes you feel for those you’re watching while maybe also thinking of those you’ve lost yourself. The worst thing about The Thing with Feathers, a film that’s supposedly about the all-consuming horror of grief, is that it never comes, not even for a second, a story about loss that fatally loses us first.
The Thing with Feathers is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
