{"id":145929,"date":"2025-11-21T20:35:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T20:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/145929\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T20:35:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T20:35:10","slug":"the-thing-with-feathers-review-cumberbatch-is-the-strong-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/145929\/","title":{"rendered":"The Thing With Feathers review \u2014 ‘Cumberbatch is the strong point’"},"content":{"rendered":"

A grief-stricken widower (Benedict Cumberbatch) finds himself assailed by a towering talking crow as he struggles to raise his two young sons.<\/p>\n

The last thing you need when your spouse has just died and you can hardly lift your head, let alone get your young boys to school on time, is an eight-foot crow squawking abuse. But that\u2019s just what Benedict Cumberbatch\u2019s nameless widower has to contend with in director Dylan Southern\u2019s narrative feature debut, The Thing With Feathers. There are physical attacks, too, with a talon-slash here, a beak-gouge there, and pummelling wing-slaps everywhere else.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The assaultive crow in question \u2014 designed by Nicola Hicks, played by Eric Lampaert, and voiced by David Thewlis, who brings something of his tirades in Mike Leigh\u2019s Naked<\/a> to the (bird) table \u2014 is a metaphor, of course. Or rather a \u2018metaphorror\u2019, given this mournful drama leans into genre territory, recalling Jennifer Kent\u2019s The Babadook<\/a> and J.A. Bayona\u2019s A Monster Calls<\/a> in how it conjures a dark fantasy monster to grapple with grief. Sadly, Southern\u2019s adaptation of Max Porter\u2019s lyrical 2015 novella Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, which was smartly adapted into a stage play starring Cillian Murphy in 2018, is a good deal less emotive than those titles.<\/p>\n

Benedict Cumberbatch is the film\u2019s strong point, going all-in as the desolate dad who suddenly finds himself facing a problem far worse than a messy house, burnt toast, and unwashed PE kits.<\/p>\n

Benedict Cumberbatch is the film\u2019s strong point, going all-in as the desolate dad who suddenly finds himself facing a problem far worse than a messy house, burnt toast, and unwashed PE kits. The best he\u2019s been since his Emmy-nominated turn as an exasperating, heartbreaking, hilarious addict in 2018 miniseries Patrick Melrose<\/a>, Cumberbatch blunders forward with his face frozen in shock… at least until the hot tears come to melt it into agony. Whether it\u2019s dealing with other parents\u2019 sympathy, having to find it in himself to \u201cdo the voices\u201d when reading a bedtime story, or enduring the tough-love avian interloper that nicknames him, mockingly, \u2018Sad Dad\u2019, he tackles it with fierce commitment.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a shame, then, that everything around him falls short of his gold standard. Character development is an issue, with the two sons wholly interchangeable and the deceased wife\/mother (Claire Cartwright, partially seen in flashbacks) proving only a cipher. Sad Dad relied on her for \u201ceverything\u201d, he insists, but little about their (imbalanced, fractured?) relationship is explained or explored. There\u2019s a similar lack of specificity applied to establishing our protagonist\u2019s profession as a graphic novelist, a career that was only chosen, you suspect, to allow for scenes of him obsessively hunching over sketches of crows.<\/p>\n

Neither detailed enough to satisfy as gut-wrenching drama or disturbing enough to work as a horror movie, The Thing With Feathers will likely leave viewers confused rather than unnerved, and mildly moved when they should be devastated<\/p>\n

Dylan Southern\u2019s film lacks the complexity of Max Porter\u2019s book. But there are strong scenes, and Cumberbatch delivers a performance to crow about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A grief-stricken widower (Benedict Cumberbatch) finds himself assailed by a towering talking crow as he struggles to raise…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145930,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-145929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}