‘The Thing with Feathers’ (2025) Movie Review - Benedict Cumberbatch's Acting Exercise

A few months ago, when Jugnuma: The Fable was playing in theatres, I urged my friends to watch it as soon as possible. Films like Jugnuma tend to disappear quickly in a country where mass-hero films continue to break box-office records. These are the films that dominate social media discourse and are cherished more for their numbers than for anything else. My friends, alas, didn't go to the theatres for Jugnuma. They watched the trailer and dismissed it as an artsy slow burn. They did, however, assure me that they would watch the film once it arrived on an OTT platform.

Why am I telling you this story? To illustrate how most people stay away from a certain kind of cinema because they perceive it as arthouse, highfalutin balderdash. And yet, if they were to give these films a genuine chance, they might realize how wrong their assumptions are. But then there are directors like Dylan Southern, who make films such as The Thing with Feathers—works that actively reinforce these prejudices. Such films place yet another obstacle before viewers who are already trying to overcome their mistrust of the so-called "artsy slow burn cinema."

The Thing with Feathers is the kind of film one can easily imagine being parodied in a show like The Studio. It is all portentous gloom and empty gestures. Based on Max Porter's 2015 novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers—which I have not read—Southern's adaptation appears to draw from Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven (the book's title itself refers to Emily Dickinson's "Hope" is the thing with feathers). In Poe's poem, a grieving lover is visited by a mysterious raven. In The Thing with Feathers, a crow intrudes upon the mental and personal space of a father who, after the death of his wife, is left to raise his two young sons. The father, referred to only as Dad, is played by Benedict Cumberbatch. This skeletal outline seems to be all the detail that matters to Southern. He shows no interest in something as elementary as giving his characters names: the children are Boy 1 (Richard Boxall) and Boy 2 (Henry Boxall), and the mother is simply Mum (Claire Cartwright).

Dad, we are told, is a comic-book writer. How good his work is remains unclear, though one assumes he has a reasonable number of fans and followers. But how does he use his creativity to process his grief—his so-called "inner demons"? How do comics help him make sense of the world? Was he always interested in the medium? Who were his influences? Southern refuses to allow flashbacks or voiceovers that might fill in these blanks to enter his tightly sealed cinematic world. The few flashbacks and voiceovers he does include merely underline the obvious: Dad terribly misses Mum. Beyond that, the film is incurious. How many friends does Dad have? What is his relationship with his family? Is he an introvert, an extrovert, or something in between? What was his marriage like? Was it happy? Strained? How did Mum die? Was it an illness, an accident, or suicide? Was she dealing with mental health issues? How do the children cope with their mother's absence? How do they navigate public spaces such as school? Do they have friends with whom they share their grief or confusion?

By eliding these specifics, Southern creates a suffocating, creatively impoverished piece of work. The characters' grief becomes grief porn—misery aestheticized to serve a dull cinematic vision. It is difficult to take seriously a film in which a symbolic figure, the Crow (Eric Lampaert) in this case, announces during a dream sequence, "This is symbolic, isn't it?" Moreover, a shot, in which blood flowing from a body forms the shape of a cross, invites not reflection but unintentional laughter.

The Thing with Feathers is, in many ways, the perfect Sundance movie: pomp and solemnity inflating the thinnest of material, a film seemingly conceived with critical acclaim and festival laurels. I suspect it exists primarily to showcase Cumberbatch's acting range—as a reminder that he can operate outside the boundaries of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In this respect, it is similar to Steve, which was designed to display Cillian Murphy's dramatic range (Murphy starred in the stage adaptation of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers). Southern, here, is so detached from his characters' emotional lives that he reduces them to decorative objects in a decorative environment. Grief can indeed be crippling. But films like these are the product of a crippling lack of imagination.

Final Score- [1/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times