Benedict Cumberbatch in Grief Drama

While many films have conjured terrifying physical manifestations of grief, one that set a notably high bar for hand-crafted horror exploring that fecund strand was Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. The specter of that brutally effective 2014 shocker proves inescapable for writer-director Dylan Southern in The Thing With Feathers, right down to a malevolent figure haunting the main characters that looks like something out of Edward Gorey. The main salvation is the staggering commitment of Benedict Cumberbatch, hurling himself into the role of a bereaved husband in a performance touched by madness that holds nothing back. His wounds are gashes continually being reopened.

The source material is Max Porter’s prize-winning 2015 novella Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, which yielded a solo stage piece three years later seen on both sides of the Atlantic, adapted and directed by Irish playwright Enda Walsh and starring a protean Cillian Murphy. The book is a short but densely packed experiment in polyphonic literature, defying categorization with its stylized mix of prose, verse, essays, jokes and fable. Such a linguistically unfettered work of fiction, while seemingly unsuited to adaptation, lent itself to Walsh’s expressionistic, highly theatrical style.

Translated to the more literal medium of film, its central metaphor — sorrow made tangible in the form of a crow that moves in, uninvited, to shepherd a family through their grief with its own tough-love methods — becomes bludgeoning, monotonous. It doesn’t help that horror seems an imperfect fit for Southern, whose background is in music docs and videos. The jump scares are so amped up and programmatic they feel more assaultive than startling.

Cumberbatch’s unnamed Dad is introduced in his living room solemnly expressing pride in his also nameless sons (Richard and Henry Boxall) for managing to get through their mother’s funeral that day. He does his best to keep it together for the saddened but resilient boys, but Dad is a wreck, his shellshocked state worsening as days go by and he waits in vain for some structure to return to his life.

He fakes being an organized parent, fixing the boys breakfast, taking them to school and trying to keep things as normal as possible for them. But the mounting disorder of the house seems to have nothing on the messiness inside his head.

That makes him a sitting duck for the malign home invasion of Crow, a menacing, disheveled presence that towers over Dad. The talking bird is played by Eric Lampaert and voiced by David Thewlis, with a working-class accent, a foul mouth and a mocking tone that makes him seem like a rancid character out of Dickens — think Fagin with wings and talons. He explains that humans are of limited interest to him, aside from grieving widowers and motherless children.

The Dad in Porter’s novel was an academic working on a scholarly text about Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, a volume written by the poet Ted Hughes after three inactive years that followed the suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath, in 1963. In the film Dad is a graphic novelist, obsessively banging out charcoal drawings of — you guessed it — crows for a forthcoming book. His publisher urges him to forget about deadlines, given his recent loss, but Dad insists it’s better for him to have a project.

Southern breaks up the story into four chapters, Dad, Boys, Crow and Demon, the first three told from those characters’ perspectives and the last depicting the violent mayhem that ensues when Dad prematurely dismisses Crow from their home. The arc goes from despair to rock-bottom desolation to fear and ultimately to the possibility of healing, though the movie is stubbornly unaffecting, despite the agonizingly raw pain and helplessness of Cumberbatch’s performance.

There are notes of poignancy in the boys’ chapter as they make observations in voiceover about the before-and-after versions of their father: “When dad changed, he went quiet and angry.” And a later scene in which they comfort him when he breaks down after a furious explosion: “Sometimes he felt like he was our dad again.” The young actors are strong, but neither boy is developed as a character beyond the irritant to their father of their boisterous playtime. That makes them little more than ciphers in a story in which they might have been expected to pierce our hearts.

While Thewlis clearly relishes dialing up the nastiness in Crow’s exchanges with “Sad Dad,” which frequently veer into physical violence, the oppressive character wears thin, too arch to work effectively as a grief metaphor and too sardonic to be genuinely scary. Which is one of the film’s key problems. Despite its shadowy visuals and insidious soundscape, it’s neither frightening enough to play like full-fledged horror, nor complex or curious enough to pack much weight as psychological drama.

Considering the delicacy of its subject matter, The Thing With Feathers is strangely distancing. Its difficulties in pinning down a tone and building an emotional charge are made worse by some very obvious vocal selections.

Southern knows how to use music to shape a scene, but the lyrics could hardly be more on-the-nose when Vic Chestnutt in “Flirted With You All My Life” sings “Oh death, I’m not ready” just as Dad appears to make a breakthrough in his grieving process. I’m never going to complain about hearing a Fairport Convention song, but “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” literally has an opening verse about birds knowing when to move on.

While Crow becomes a bit much, the movie is at its best when it embraces the dark humor in the man-bird encounter to the same extent that Thewlis does. I laughed at Crow’s scorn for Dad’s maudlin choice of music one night, contemptuously nudging the needle off Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s funereal “I Called You Back” on the turntable and replacing it with the convulsive, foot-stomping dirty blues of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins doing “Feast of the Mau Mau.”

At first Crow manipulates Dad like a puppet, guiding him from stiff movement into a kind of limber wildman trance. The bird then steps back to savor his success at orchestrating a moment of primal release for the bereaved man. It’s a welcome moment of uplift in a movie that makes it hard for us to feel much of anything because it’s too busy clobbering us over the head.