Director: Dylan Southern
Writer: Dylan Southern
Stars: Benedict Cumberbatch, Henry Boxall, Richard Boxall
Synopsis: After a tragic loss, a grieving father tries to raise his young sons whilst dealing with an unlikely, unpredictable and uninvited houseguest.
Film is a good medium for tackling the complexities of grief. It’s a medium in which we can see the realities of the emotion and a manifestation of the agony of our characters. This can be many things, but is in many instances given personification, identity, and expression all its own. Grief often takes on the guise of birds, or bird creatures. There is something about the bird’s migratory nature and the fact that grief comes upon you out of the sky that easily evokes the metaphor of grief.
Yet, The Thing with Feathers uses not only a bird, but a sort of bird hybrid. At first Crow (voiced by David Thewlis) is shrouded in shadow and appears as a common crow, but as the other characters come to understand its presence in their lives and how it hurts in order to help, we see Crow more clearly. Rather than go the less cost effective, but maybe more movement effective, route of CGI, the filmmakers chose to have a physical costume and actor, Eric Lampaert, to portray this character.
Creature and prosthetics designer Conor O’ Sullivan and the special effects team created and brought to life a character unlike any other. Combine the technical with the physical performance of Lampaert and the sometimes comforting and sometimes menacing augmented voice of Thewlis and you almost wish this was just a film about Crow. The character is just a little less interesting than its physical form, though. Kind of like the majority of the film.
Films with unreliable focal characters are tough to pull off well. The idea of Dad’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) life falling apart is easy to understand. It’s easy to find an emotional way into empathizing with his and the Boys’ (Henry and Richard Boxall) grief. What gets complicated and muddled is their collective experience of their grief. The logical parts of our brains tend to fight against the inconsistencies and push against what we’re actually seeing. It’s very difficult to rectify that, especially as focal points of view shift within the film’s different segments.
One could argue that this is what grief amounts to, but we could also easily argue that narrative needs a more solid structure with which to stand on. Dylan Southern is not completely off base with either his script or his direction. There are scenes that are very good amongst the ho hum of the entire film. The sequence titled “The Boys” is probably the best example of his prowess. The psychology of the two boys is described in their own words over narration is sublime and a scene between the Boys and Crow is heartbreaking.
Crow gives them a false promise. He promises that the boy that can create the best representation of their dead mother will have his representation come to life for a day. The Boys work diligently. They create and think about their mother, using her things to try and manifest her the best they can. Then, as they finish, Crow tells them what they already know. He tells them there was no way to bring her back, she’s gone. The anger and sadness that erupts is primal and emotionally striking. It’s an excellent sequence that draws us in better than any of the scenes with Dad alone.
This scene and a handful of others makes you wish this had been a short instead of a feature. Even with a reasonable runtime, The Thing with Feathers feels like a drag. It wallows for so long without forward momentum it feels stuck. It makes us sit in discomfort with the film and the fact that the film says nothing new or revelatory about grief or the descent from grief into despair. There are moments of good filmmaking and storytelling, but it’s hard to balance that completely with the stagnation of the rest. It’s at best a pretty familiar dissection of grief and at worst a portrait of solipsistic wallowing.
