Dylan Southern adapts the Max Porter novella, ‘Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,’ about a widowed father and the menacing giant crow that attaches itself to his sorrow.

In "The Thing With Feathers," based on the 2015 novel "Grief is the Thing With Feathers" by Max Porter, grief is manifested by a giant, anthropomorphized crow, who alternately haunts and helps a family recover from the sudden loss of its wife and mother.

Horror films aren’t exactly known for their subtlety, but The Thing With Feathers has no subtlety in sight. On paper, The Thing With Feathers does seem like

Crow never becomes a gripping character; he's too sternly abstract, too hectoring, too much of a visual effect in search of a personality.

Played by Benedict Cumberbatch, he is an artist of sorts; some people call his work “comic books,” others call them “graphic novels,” a term he thinks is “wanky.” His output is alluded to in the film’s atmospheric credit sequence,

The actor is at his best, most alive and inventive here. But The Thing With Feathers doesn’t know what kind of movie to be.

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The Thing With Feathers may be based on a book, but it also takes inspiration from an unlikely source — the album cover of the Who's 1979 album, The Kids Are Alright. The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on Saturday night,