otherwise known as a feather duster, which you'd know if
you'd ever used one
dir: Dylan Southern
2025
“What” is the Thing with Feathers, you could be forgiven for asking with such a title, and the answer would be “Grief”. Grief is the thing with feathers. Not “Hope”, from the Emily Dickinson poem. She lied to us.
Grief. It makes other people uncomfortable. The critics, how shall I say this, fucking hated this flick, even though it has a Cumberbatch in it, and critics are usually well-disposed towards Cumberbatches. Maybe it is a shit film, and I just can’t see it, because I’m blinded by…something.
I feel like I got a lot out of it. I find it fascinating that there are so many films recently about people grieving in their own demented ways, with birds of different types playing such a key role in the story. H is for Hawk famously has a hawk in it, being Mabel the goshawk, but is more about Helen grieving for her father. Tuesday has a macaw standing in for Death Itself, as a mother pre-emptively grieves for her dying daughter. The recent abominable Crow remake, like all iterations of the franchise, has a character brought back to life to avenge the death of a beloved. By a puffin. No, sorry, I meant a crow.
Look, I get that we associate crows and ravens with death, but really, now it’s any and every bird standing in for the Grim Reaper.
And I think I recall watching a recentish Melissa McCarthy movie that had a bird standing in for her lost daughter in The Starling, or grief, or the general shittiness of life, something.
Birds equal death and grief and loss. Such a burden for such tiny shoulders.
Cumberbatch plays a grieving dad, a “sad dad” as he is mocked, later on. He has two young boys to look after, and he is not coping well. His wife, their mother, we never really see or get to know. Her absence leaves a tremendous void, an unfillable void. That is one of the many ways we understand grief as experienced by this character.
We like saying to people “so sorry for your loss, if there’s anything you need, I know people say that, but I really mean it, anything you need, just ask” but then we understand, you’re meant to leave it there. You did your duty, now leave the grieving person / people alone until they sort their shit out. If you do have to chat with them, make sure to make awkward jokes to try to lighten the mood or change the very uncomfortable subject to something else.
Grief is vast, yes, I’ve written that many times before, and different for different people at different times. This flick tries to go out of its ways to show the heaviness of trying to carry on and do all the ‘normal’ everyday stuff when you’re drowning in grief. One could say “no-one wants to see that”, and in truth it’s uncomfortable to watch. It is uncomfortable watching someone spiralling further and further down. It is the opposite of what people generally go to a cinema to watch.
I hesitate to say “but that’s reality”, because nothing in this flick transpires like the reality that we’re used to. Other than how much people generally don’t want to deal with watching another person experiencing grief, we don’t always enjoy watching them spiralling down further and further until… well we don’t know what. We want them not to come to harm, but it’s also that we’d like someone to not be so overwhelmed so that we don’t feel uncomfortable, not just because we want them not to suffer.
Precious little of this flick is not harrowing, but it’s debatable as to whether even people who weren’t annoyed by it found it effective or meaningful. The dad suffers damage at the hands of a crow, a physical and unignorable manifestation of his grief, he gets smacked around good and proper, but what does it mean? The “damage”, the depiction of damage disappears at first, so we’re left thinking “uh, okay, well I guess it wasn’t that bad?”
That crow, that voice. It’s a familiar one. David Thewlis, yes, great actor, but he has a way with words. That nasty voice of his. We get it, even early on, this voice is a voice the dad hears inside his head, telling him what a piece of shit he is, how much he is failing his sons, himself, his wife’s memory, how he’s failing at everything and that he’s not even an interesting cliché, he’s a dull cliché with the depth of a cheery message on a fridge magnet.
It’s one thing to be wallowing in grief, but it’s entirely something else to have your grief mock you back.
The boys (Richard and Henry Boxall, brothers in real life) mostly just look on in fear as their dad gets angrier and more cut off from the world around them. They’re just kids – the flick does not use them precociously to extract life lessons or speak key supportive phrases that jolt the dad out of his hell. They’re just kids who miss their mum and who miss their dad, who is physically present, but mentally far far away.
I guess one positive of their situation is that the dad works from home, so in theory he’d be best placed to continue working and looking after his primary school aged kids, but of course he throws himself into his work, which seems to just be increasingly more unhinged drawings and paintings of the crow that dominates his thoughts.
Cheekily, malevolently, the crow says something almost like what Nanny McPhee says in her stories, about staying while you need her but don’t want her, and leaving when you want her but don’t need her, except he says “I won’t leave until you don’t need me anymore”.
Who needs such a tormentor, such a bully? Someone who wants to suffer, and this dad wants to suffer, thinking it somehow will bring her back even when he knows it won’t.
And then, of course, once we thought that the crow would be as bad as it gets, there’s something worse that comes along and threatens the family; the demon of Despair.
This film is a mixture of the literal, the lyrical, the metaphorical and the manifested, and I’m not going to pretend it’s a pleasant ride. It seems to want to have its cake and eat it too, which perhaps dampens some of the impact of the visuals. Of course we know that there isn’t an actual giant crow there, or a demon wanting to kill the dad, but the attacks as well that we’re watching aren’t meant to be taken literally even when the entities we’re watching inflict these harms are ‘real’ in a limited context.
My partner, who did not care for this flick at all, thought it came across as just a cheap and nasty horror flick, which, okay, that’s an opinion, but I, who doesn’t think it is a horror flick, ‘enjoyed’ it in the sense that I found it affecting, and I sympathised with the hell the family goes through (that the father puts them through), and I even laughed at much of what the crow says and does, the cheeky bugger.
It is not an easy or pleasant watch, because watching someone struggling with mental illness isn’t easy, and its especially tense to watch what we think are two young boys in peril. A further question would be whether it earns its ending, and I like to think that it did, even if maybe I was just relieved that things didn’t get worse when despair seems like it’s going to swallow everything.
And yes, I acknowledge the debt a flick like this owes to The Babadook, as do a lot of films that externalise trauma, grief, resentment towards your kids, but it’s not trying to be that either.
In the end it wants to offer us comfort, a big, dark-winged hug, but it wants us to suffer along the way, so we appreciate the hug more. I would not say it’s one of Cumberbatch’s best performances because acting like a half-crow, half-crack addict isn’t an Olympic event (though it should be), but he does give a decent sense of someone unravelling.
There’s this moment where he acknowledges that he was a pretty shitty, neglectful dad well before his partner died that I found particularly gutting. He thought he was doing her a favour, spending time with the boys in the snow, but it just showed him how ill-equipped he was to do so properly, having never given it much thought before.
While much of what I’m describing may sound fairly self-indulgent, I think the dulcet, sarcastic tone of the crow does much to undercut both the abjectness of the misery the dad is trying to express, and it also prevents anyone from finding comfort in clichés or trite statements, life being this complex thing we live that doesn’t seem to respond too well to pithy quips or pleasant intentions.
7 times maybe the sad dad can hook up with the sad hawk lady out of 10?
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“Grieving widower to aisle nine. Grieving widower to aisle nine. Stick to routines, is that what he said? Children need routines? Not those boys. Those boys need bows and arrows. They need stories, they need a myths, they need chaos, they need Crow!” - we all need Crow, but we don’t all deserve Crow - The Thing with Feathers
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