The Thing with Feathers is not that they tickle it’s because here they belong to a giant crow that haunts and torments a grieving widower as he struggles with his grief whilst trying to raise his two young sons. Based on the novella ‘Grief is the Thing With Feathers’ by Max Porter which due to its loose disjointed format and structure was never an easy read and equally makes it not the easiest of books to adapt for the big screen.
At the centre of this is Dad, his actual name is never known, played by Benedict Cumberbatch struggling with his grief at the death of his wife and now struggling to raise his two young sons. It was always mum who did the heavy lifting when it came to child care and now it’s all on Dad and he’s not coping well at all. It’s exasperated by visions of a giant crow voiced by David Thewlis that torments him, mocks him and aggravates him pushing his grief to the edge of his sanity as he endeavours to raise his sons on his own and hold down his own job as an illustrator.
Split into four chapters Dad, Boys, Crow and finally Demon the film always centres on Dad as he goes through those early stages of grief and here it’s the usual seen-it-before struggle with cooking, sudden outbursts of anger and irritation with the children. Add to that the torment of the crow it only exacerbates it further but it’s never really made clear what the crow wants or what it represents.
There is something of The Babadook about this, (there’s a nod towards it with one of the boys books their father reads them) but The Thing with Feathers despite several very well realized sequences with a committed performance from Cumberbatch that taps into everyone’s experience of loss but the film loses its way never quite sure whether to settle on horror or drama.
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Here’s the trailer for The Thing with Feathers…….
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