The Thing with Feathers: Grief becomes a horror show in this visually striking adaptation of Max Porter’s novella

It’s surprising that Max Porter’s piercingly sad and much-celebrated polyphonic novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015) took a decade to reach the big screen. A shape-shifting story combining the voices of a bereaved family alongside the trickster Crow of grief that dogs them, Porter’s book jumps nimbly between moods, and in and out of prose and poetry. It’s a brave choice for first-time fiction feature director Dylan Southern, who co-created the scrappy indie-rock history Meet Me in the Bathroom (2022) with Will Lovelace. In his hands, Porter’s slender book, deft and sharp-eyed in its treatment of bereavement, becomes an intense and oppressive battle between man and crow which yokes supernatural horror to mind-bending grief.

Early on, as Benedict Cumberbatch’s newly widowed Dad struggles to mute his post-funeral misery, it looks as if Southern’s arresting visual style might provide a melancholy originality to match Porter’s use of language. Crowding Dad and his two sons into a dimly lit, claustrophobic 4:3 ratio and tightly framing them alone in their individual sadness gives the film a tense, intimate feel. As he drowns in domestic chaos, Dad’s flailing attempts to comfort the stunned boys feel convincingly raw (real-life brothers Richard and Henry Boxall are pleasingly natural as the nameless kids, spinning from withdrawn silence to shouty disobedience). But the film is a slow starter, indulging a taste for repetition with a welter of signs, with a capital S, heralding the bird’s arrival. A crow bangs noisily off windows, perches on the boys’ bed rails, flails unseen inside the chimney breast. Introduced as a thrashing glimpse of oily black feathers, the bird supplies a weary succession of jump scares.

Once the seven-foot Crow has tricked its way into the house to taunt Dad (“You don’t get to say how this goes any more!”.), it’s plain that he is a psychological manifestation of Dad’s grief. The hellish house guest has emerged from the graphic novel-cum-memoir Dad is feverishly creating, spattered with inky, cruel images of Crow himself. He’s portrayed with prowling menace by actor Eric Lampaert in an impressive swivelling animatronic head, with creepy mutterings voiced by David Thewlis far scarier than any CGI offering. But where the book was impressionistic, his looming, resolutely physical figure clumping round the house makes Crow (and the film) feel suddenly very literal. Around Crow, the film’s metaphors become clunkier he – embodies nagging misery as a hated companion, while eruptions of violent grief are styled as Crow’s sudden WWE-style assaults on Dad. Heavy-handed needle drops like Vic Chesnutt’s doomy ‘Flirted with You All My Life’ add more moody underlining.

And as Crow rolls out his eruptions and scares, they start to feel like supernatural disturbances rather than emotional ones, his macabre form giving off a distinct Babadook feel. We become increasingly unsure whether we’re watching a psychological drama or a horror film; but rather than an intriguing genre mix, it presents as a story that doesn’t know which side to land on. Tuesday (2023), another film about death featuring a crazed parent and a giant bird, suffered from the same problem but had an unvarnished power that this one does not.

This is a great pity, since the movie is thoughtful and visually striking, shot with real skill squeezing the Crow into the corners of the frame, or casting his shadow over the boys to ratchet up his oppressive presence. It handles the story’s temporal looseness cleverly, making snowy flashbacks into stylised, almost theatrical vignettes. But the triptych structure, showing the increasingly untethered points of view of first Dad, then the boys and finally Crow himself, feels unbalanced. Dad is SO utterly absorbed in his tumultuous battles with Crow, on the page and in his mind, that his children are left on the margins. And as Crow throws him about the study again, or rains jars on him in the supermarket, Dad’s corvid cage-fights feel as if they’re on repeat rather than ramping up.

Blazing away in the middle of everything, however, is Cumberbatch’s balls-to-the-wall performance as “sad, mad Dad”. He throws himself unsparingly into the fights, and a drunken solitary dance of such reckless, despairing abandon that it rivals the extreme states he explored in TV’s Patrick Melrose (2018). Crouching to simulate a crow or pulling his hand into a claw to draw the bird, he gives off an emotional realism that the scares-and-slashes narrative around him can’t muster. His fearless interpretation gives the film something to crow about.

► The Thing with Feathers is in UK cinemas 21 November.