Review of The Thing with Feathers (2025)
Seen in 2026.
An artist who relied heavily on his wife suddenly loses her. He tries to take care of his two boys, but grief gets the better of him. It moves in with them.
This film is claustrophobically centred on its star, but I think he does a good job of it. Ignore comparisons to The Babadook (2014); The Thing with Feathers is barely even uncanny in the Todorovian sense, because the viewer is not lead to believe that Crow may be a real monster. It’s clearly a metaphorical representation of changes and self-criticism in the artist, and that’s fine. David Thewlis’s mumbling voice work for it is very nice. The visual representation of Crow could have been better though. I enjoyed the visual artwork with pen, paper and ink; a 2D-animated Crow in that style would probably have worked better, growing from sketches to spilled ink.
The script is based on Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015), but the retitling of it in adaptation allows for looping back to Dickinson’s original “‘Hope’ Is the Thing With Feathers” (1861/1862), for which the novella was named.