Benedict Cumberbatch will be returning to our screens in The Thing with Feathers, a story of grief and chaos. Adapted from Max Porter’s acclaimed novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, the film follows a widowed father and his two young sons as they struggle to process the sudden loss of their wife and mother, only to find their grief taking on a surreal, physical form.
More than a conventional drama, the story transforms sorrow into something visceral and unsettling. As a crow-shaped presence stalks the family’s home, it explores how pain can both destroy and heal, resulting in one of Cumberbatch’s most alive, haunting, and inventive performances.
Directed by Dylan Southern, the film blends intimate family drama with haunting, fantastical imagery to examine how grief reshapes identity, masculinity, and parenthood. As the father fights to hold his family together while hiding his own sorrow, the film offers a deeply emotional, yet ultimately hopeful look on what it truly means to live with loss rather than simply “get over” it.
Talking about how grief is portrayed, Benedict Cumberbatch said, “Max’s novel is an exceptional piece of prose. It’s lyrical, damaged, salvational, majestical, mundane, domestic, real and surreal. It is an extraordinary prism through which to reflect grief – the structure and intimacy of it. I wanted to keep Dad’s humanity. I wanted, as an actor, to be able to bring across somebody who is very human in his failings – someone who is working through things moment by moment. I think everyone in the film, from Max through to us, knows that grief is a universal experience. It’s also a very rare thing in culture to explore that through a male experience.”
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