The Thing With Feathers may be based on a book, but it also takes inspiration from an unlikely source — the album cover of the Who's 1979 album, The Kids Are Alright. The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on Saturday night,

Dylan Southern adapts the Max Porter novella, ‘Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,’ about a widowed father and the menacing giant crow that attaches itself to his sorrow.

The actor is at his best, most alive and inventive here. But The Thing With Feathers doesn’t know what kind of movie to be.

Played by Benedict Cumberbatch, he is an artist of sorts; some people call his work “comic books”, others call them “graphic novels”, a term he thinks is “wanky”. His output is alluded to in the film’s atmospheric credit sequence,

Crow never becomes a gripping character; he's too sternly abstract, too hectoring, too much of a visual effect in search of a personality.

Benedict Cumberbatch is committed, but Dylan Southern's 'The Thing With Feathers' is simply burdened by wallowing in its characters' despair