if you’re a glutton for grief, wait until Friday and make a double feature of Hamnet and the Thing With feathers, and just let all those feelings out.An emotional cleansing. when i first heard Benedict Cumberbatch was in a film about loss, featuring a bird, I was reminded of Tuesday, which released last year with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. This one takes an even darker tone, but does it work?

Cumberbatch plays a widower still reeling from the loss of his spouse, and trying to figure out how to raise his two young boys without her.n He’s also an artist, who earns money from drawing monsters, so color me not surprised when he’s visited by one. A crow (voiced by David Thewlis), comes in, or does he? Is this an imagination? Is this really happening or has he lost his marbles for good. As the film pushes on, the Crow is more persistent in pushing Cumberbatch to deal with his grief instead of internalizing it, and hiding it from his kids.

the film certainly takes on a creative and dark approach, more than I assumed, but really stays close to the concept that this is a cathartic process for dealing with grief. It works, and also doesn’t. Benedict Cumberbatch is, of course, terrific. But it was a missed opportunity to not have him in the dual role of dad and bird. if you’ve ever seen him working on his motion capture work during The Hobbit, you’ll know he’s very committed to the process. here, he does start to take on some crow like tendencies, but since the film has two actors as the Crow, one doing the physical work, and Thewlis doing the voice, I have to believe this would have been far more effective just letting Cumberbatch steal the whole movie. It would make sense too, since the bird seems to fly right out of his imagination and off the page.

the first third of the film didn’t really work for me, as the kids don’t seem to realize their mother just died. These kids are laughing, having fun, and show no signs of being in mourning, yet their dad clearly is. It isn’t until the second act, where after the boys went to spend some time with their Grandmother, we see boys dealing with grief at their age. It flashes back to seeing them learn about it for the first time, and builds the context around it until finally every member of the household, human or otherwise, is aware of the hill needed to climb to get to the other side of the five stages of grief.

I appreciate a lot about the film, and think the second acgt is the meat and potatoes, but it is bookended by a first act that meanders and lacks reinforcement in terms of the young actors and their connection to their mother, and is finished with a nutty finale that leaves more questions than answers. Come for the Cumberflash, and stay for the take on moving on from tragedy.

Creative but flawed, the Thing With Feathers succeeds best when all involved are on the same page, otherwise Benedict Cumberbatch feels like he’s carrying the whole thing. The structure could have benefitted from a bit more alignmentt as the crow flies.

Fresh: Final Grade: 6.9/10