Review: ‘The Thing With Feathers’ (2025), starring Benedict Cumberbatch

December 13, 2025

by Carla Hay

“The Thing With Feathers” (2025)

Directed by Dylan Southern

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed city in England, the dramatic film “The Thing With Feathers” (based on the novella “Grief Is the Thing With Feathers”) features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few black people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: An author/illustrator, who is recently widowed, struggles with raising his two pre-teen sons and finishing his most recent book, as he deals with grief and has hallucinations of an antagonistic giant crow that represents grief.

Culture Audience: “The Thing With Feathers” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of star Benedict Cumberbatch, the book on which the movie is based, and pretentious and repetitive movies about people dealing with the loss of loved ones.

There are plenty of dramas that have meaningful portrayals of how people cope with the deaths of loved ones. “The Thing With Feathers” is not one of these dramas. If you want to see a dull, drab, and mostly depressing movie where Benedict Cumberbatch is a widower who has verbal and physical conflicts with an 8-foot-tall crow that represents grief, then “The Thing With Feathers” is the movie for you.

Written and directed by Dylan Southern, “The Thing With Feathers” is adapted from Max Porter’s award-winning 2015 novella “Grief Is the Thing With Feathers.” This book has also been made into a stage play, beginning in 2018, with the most notable version being a 2018 Irish touring production starring Cillian Murphy in the leading role of the unnamed widower and as the giant crow. “The Thing With Feathers” movie had its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The movie takes place in an unnamed city in England and was actually filmed in London and in Bristol, England.

The story in “The Thing With Features” is simple to a fault: A middle-aged man, identified only in the end credits as Dad (played by Cumberbatch), is depressed over his unnamed dead wife, who got sick and suddenly died. A conversation in the movie reveals that Dad was the one who found her bleeding on a floor from a presumable fall. Throughout the movie, Dad hallucinates seeing an 8-foot-tall crow (played by Eric Lampaert, voiced by David Thewlis), which represents grief and acts like a “tough love” therapist to Dad.

Dad argues with the crow, dances with the crow, and has brawls with the crow. The crow’s often-insulting lectures are very one-note: The crow thinks Dad should snap out of the depression because the crow thinks all of Dad’s moping around is self-indulgent and unhealthy.

Dad has an obsession with crows and birds that look like crows. Throughout his home, he has illustrations and paintings of these birds. Many of these illustrations are his own, which he draws while hunched over his drawing board and scribbling these illustrations manically.

The drawings (all done in black ink) look like the types of drawings that you see in movies about disturbed people who draw monster creatures before they go on some type of killing spree. It’s later revealed that Dad is an author/illustrator of an upcoming book that he’s having trouble finishing because he’s been so consumed by grief. Appallingly, the movie makes it look like if Dad can finish this book, then he must be on the road to recovery, when his issues are so much deeper than the task of finishing a book.

“The Thing With Feathers” begins by showing Dad and his two unnamed sons at their home after the funeral of Dad’s unnamed wife (played by Claire Cartwright), who was the mother of the two sons. She is listed as Mum in the movie’s end credits. The older son, who is listed as Boy 1 (played by Richard Boxall) in the end credits, is about 7 or 8 years old. The younger son, listed as Boy 2 (played by Henry Boxall) in the end credits, is about 5 or 6 years old.

Dad tells his sons that they did an “amazing job” at the funeral. He also tells them solemnly that their mother was “the most amazing mum, boys. We must never forget that.” Later in the movie, he scolds his sons when he sees them trying on her clothes and makeup. It’s the boys’ obvious way of trying to make their mother come alive again, but Dad acts as if the boys are trying to turn into drag queens.

Apparently, this death is all Dad can think about for much of the movie, which is why the crow shows up. First, the crow lurks at night and making noises outside the window. And then later, the crow does a “home invasion” and stays for the sole purpose of making Dad uncomfortable. The visual effects for the crow are mediocre and make some parts of the movie look laughably bad.

At one point, Dad gets so depressed, he won’t get out of bed. His brother Andy (played by Tim Plester) has to check up on him to see if he’s doing okay. At a local park, Dad visits with a woman named Amanda (played by Vinette Robinson), who was a mutual friend of Dad and his wife. And all Amanda can talk about is how she thought that Dad and the dead wife were an ideal couple.

Dad takes his sons to spend the Christmas holiday with the wife’s parentse—Margaret (played by Lesley Molony) and Keith (played by Garry Cooper)—and these parents-in-law can’t stop talking about her either. Dad tells Andy that he’s annoyed when Margaret calls him to reminisce about Dad’s dead wife. Margaret describes her dead daughter as quick-witted and strong-willed. We’ll have to take her word for it because the flashbacks scenes with her are so brief and superficial, they’re not enough to show what this woman was really like.

Dad has hired a compassionate therapist named Dr. Bowden (played by Leo Bill) for his sons, but Dad clearly needs a therapist too. When Dad is in full-on crow hallucination mode and “interacting” with the crow, other people see him talking to himself and acting like there’s an imaginary being in the room that’s being difficult with him. When people in your life see you in the middle of your living room, as you punch your fists and shout at a creature that really isn’t there, it’s time to call the mental health professionals.

But that doesn’t really happen to Dad. Although Dr. Bowden appears to be a nice person, he doesn’t seem to be making much progress with the boys. Dr. Bowden gives therapy assignments to the boys and then says they don’t have to do these assignments if they don’t feel like it. All that Dr. Bowden will say to Dad, who is much more troubled than the boys, is this vague comment: “I think we should talk about the difference between grief and despair.”

“The Thing With Feathers” stumbles along with repetition and jarring narrative shifts. The movie has chapters titled “Dad,” “Crow,” “Boys” and “Demon” that show the perspectives of each of the characters who get a chapter named after them. And yes, the crow isn’t the only creature that’s haunting Dad. There’s also a demon (played by Adam Basil, voiced by Kevin Howarth), who shows up when the movie takes a bizarre turn and starts to look like a “Poltergeist” knockoff.

Cumberbatch gives a performance that can best be described as “sleepwalking,” because Dad is in such a delusional state of mind for much of the story, he isn’t fully conscious and completely emotionally present in the real world. The rest of the characters in the movie are very underdeveloped, with performances that match their mostly vague personalities. The subplot about Dad finishing the book is very muddled. And considering his serious mental health crisis, which the movie tries to make look it’s a whimsical phase and something he can handle on his own, finishing this book shouldn’t be on his list of top priorities when he can barely be a functioning human being.

Worst of all, “The Thing With Feathers” has a very irresponsible and unrealistic approach to how people can manage or overcome mental illnesses while grieving. Talking to an imaginary giant bird is not the solution, no matter how much this horrible movie tries to convince people that it is. Viewers will learn nothing about Dad except this character and how this movie ends look as phony as a male crow laying an ostrich egg.

Briarcliff Entertainment released “The Thing With Feathers” in select U.S. cinemas on November 28, 2025.