Film Review – The Thing with Feathers

“Grief is the Thing with Feathers” was a 2015 book by Max Porter, exploring the ways of death, recovery, and parenthood. Writer/director Dylan Southern looks to take the strange journey of the novel and turn it into cinema, with help from star Benedict Cumberbatch, who is no stranger to playing tortured characters. The material doesn’t directly assess the weakened state of a newly widowed father trying to make sense of the world and handle the care of his two young sons, going a more abstract direction with the tale, which involves the horror of a human-sized crow complicating the grieving process for a vulnerable character. “The Thing with Feathers” is very strange and also tries to be extremely sincere, but adaptation challenges are often too difficult to conquer. As much as Southern tries to respect the source material and play intense psychological games, he doesn’t create a particularly compelling picture. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com