Cheap jump scares punctuate this grief-stricken slog
Sometimes you swing and miss, but at least you swung. The Thing With Feathers is a big swing and a miss. Aiming to entice horror fans with its phantasmagoric plot and cheap jump scares, The Thing With Feathers fails to offer anything more than a singular message about grief being tough to overcome. Despite Benedict Cumberbatch’s (The Roses) efforts to compensate for a shallow script and one-dimensional character, The Thing With Feathers remains a frustrating viewing experience.
After the unexpected death of his wife, Dad (Cumberbatch) is left to raise his two young sons. Dad is a comic artist, working on a new book featuring a crow-man monster, referred to simply as Crow (voiced by David Thewlis). The line between reality and imagination, dreams and waking nightmares begins to blur as Crow invades Dad’s consciousness with equal parts taunts and guidance regarding Dad’s debilitating grief. In scenes where Crow is manifested with practical effects, the film is at its best and most horrific. However, other scenes are often punctuated with a random screeching crow or one flying into a window, just to make us jump. In a film that is distractingly dark to the point that I had to squint to see what’s happening numerous times, going for jump scares instead of a dreadfully silent atmosphere was the wrong choice. The loud bangs remind us that the intervening minutes are gloomy and boring.
The symbolism in The Thing With Feathers is established well within its first fifteen minutes. Crow is a manifestation of the family’s grief, wreaking mental havoc among the family. From that point, the characters and symbols don’t change. There are no revelations or meaningful arcs. The film is divided into four chapters, signifying slightly shifting perspectives – Dad, Crow, Boys, and The Demon – the last part being about another monster that threatens to tear Dad apart, symbolizing the latter’s unending despair. Aside from that last chapter, which at least introduces a new element to the story, the rest of the chapters don’t differ in any meaningful way.
By the end of The Thing With Feathers, we’re asked to feel that Dad needed to go through the stages of grief with Crow and get in touch with his deepest emotions to reach acceptance and move on. Okay, so what? We got the sense that this was the trajectory from the very beginning, so why make us sit through a repetitive, dimly lit journey? Cumberbatch’s impressive physicality and emotional rawness can’t rescue this film. There’s a one-minute sequence early in the film featuring a woman trying awkwardly to approach Dad and his sons as they walk home from school. It’s the only genuinely humorous moment in the movie, and it made me wonder, when the film finally ended, if there was a more realistic, meaningful portrayal of grief underneath all the feathers, one that the filmmaking team abandoned in favor of pursuing cheap, obvious horror.
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The Thing With Feathers opens in theaters on Friday, Nov. 28th.
