The Thing with Feathers: Benedict Cumberbatch's surreal horror is a squawking misfire

Some books cast a spell, which must be what attracted Benedict Cumberbatch to star in The Thing with Feathers. But that doesn't mean they're destined to make great films, however honest everyone's aims, and diligent their acting.
Writer-director Dylan Southern turns a very literary tour de force into cinema that clomps, languishes and squawks 'METAPHOR!' with almost no plot to motor it along. On the page, the conceit of Max Porter's 2015 debut novella Grief is the Thing with Feathers – that of a giant crow presiding over a widower's bereavement – was certainly a flex, showing promising gumption. Lo and behold, Porter's next novel Lanny (2019) was altogether wondrous.
The former book has already been adapted for the stage, in a well-liked 2018 version by Enda Walsh, starring Cillian Murphy. Southern wants to meet Porter's achievement anew, but it's an almighty hurdle to set himself as a first-time feature director. The supposed climax becomes a hellscape in all the wrong ways, as well as an unwieldy genre hybrid, about one-third of the way (but no more) to Babadook-esque horror.
As a straight grief drama, which is how things start, The Thing with Feathers does make some gritty inroads – which is kind of impressive, given how weirdly unspecific it all is. Cumberbatch is a grieving father, unnamed except as 'Dad' by his two young sons (Henry and Richard Boxall). His late wife has collapsed in a freak accident at home and died; he found the body. While concealing his full devastation to preserve a sense of normality, he can't handle the small things: putting milk in the fridge, not burning the toast, stopping these tykes trundling all over him.
He's an illustrator, which cues up his black feathered nemesis, Crow, to make a looming leap off the page. After the Netflix drama Eric, which paired Cumberbatch with an imaginary blue puppet monster that helped his character cope with losing his son, we perhaps need to call time now on him sharing the screen with lumbering personifications of emotion.
This man-sized corvine figment rasps in the voice of David Thewlis – who else? – and taunts him as a 'Sad Dad' hitting the bottle. Alas, the relationship being sold between Crow and Dad's grief is so hammeringly obvious it gives the film nowhere to go but down.
Southern directs the young brothers well – there's a degree of spite to their rough-housing that's believable. And Cumberbatch, who has never phoned in any performance I've seen, is doing everything he can to keep the film in touch with reality.
But the problems are insurmountable. The material is just so ill-suited to this unpoetic quasi-horror approach. The lighting in the house turns sickly; the iffily designed creature starts flapping around in a frenzy; the viewer feels nothing. There's no way Southern can lift us out of this pit of despond, which is what Porter's flair for literary invention did. It's a grim situation – like watching a film peck at its own entrails.

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