You don’t get over it. You don’t move on. You learn to live with the thing—the gaping, screaming void where a person used to be. And sometimes, if the stories are to be believed, the thing learns to live with you. It takes up space. It breathes your air. It talks back.
That’s the brutal, fantastical premise of “The Thing With Feathers,” the new grief drama from director Dylan Southern, and its first official trailer is a raw, beautiful, and deeply unsettling piece of work. Briarcliff Entertainment just unleashed it, and it’s already haunting me more than most full-length horror films. Benedict Cumberbatch plays a widowed father—credited simply as “Dad”—whose life shatters after his wife’s unexpected death. Left to raise two young sons in a home now defined by absence, his grief doesn’t just linger… it manifests. It becomes Crow.
When Sorrow Has a Voice
The trailer opens with the quiet devastation of domestic life after loss. The muted colors. The empty spaces at the table. Cumberbatch, an actor who can project towering intellect or profound brokenness with the same subtle shift in his eyes, is perfectly cast here. He looks hollowed out. Then… the voice. A gritty, taunting, almost sing-song rasp from the shadows. “Only until you don’t need me anymore…”
This is Eric Lampaert as the voice of Crow, the “unhinged and unwanted house guest” adapted from Max Porter’s bestselling novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. And what a voice it is. It’s not a monster’s growl; it’s something far more insidious—a provocateur, a tormentor, a perverse therapist who might just be the only thing that can save him. The genius of the trailer, and presumably the film’s central metaphor, is that Crow isn’t presented as a CGI spectacle. He’s a practical effect, a creature designed by the acclaimed Conor O’Sullivan, and the trailer wisely holds him back. We see glimpses—a dark shape, a suggestion of feathers—letting our minds, and Dad’s deteriorating psyche, build the horror.
It’s a power move. In an era of digital overload, this feels tactile, real, and infinitely more threatening. Everyone in this trailer looks like they haven’t slept in weeks—was this shot under a permanent, gloomy English sky? The atmosphere is thick with it.
From Music Docs to Emotional Nightmares
This is a significant pivot for director Dylan Southern, who cut his teeth on brilliant, kinetic music documentaries like Shut Up & Play the Hits, which chronicled LCD Soundsystem’s final (at the time) Madison Square Garden show. He’s moving from the ecstatic collapse of a crowd to the silent collapse of a single man. The transition feels… natural, somehow. Both are about rhythm, about the spaces between the noise, about an ending that begets a new, complicated beginning.
The cast surrounding Cumberbatch is stellar—Vinette Robinson and the always-welcome David Thewlis provide the necessary grounded counterpoints to Dad’s surreal nightmare. But this is Cumberbatch’s show, a showcase for a kind of raw, unhinged performance we don’t always get from him. He’s not Sherlock solving a puzzle; he’s a man being torn apart by one he can never solve.
The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and is slated for a London Film Festival screening before its theatrical bow. Briarcliff Entertainment will debut “The Thing With Feathers” in select US theaters on November 28, 2025.
So, What’s the Verdict?
Look, I’ll be honest. The word from Park City was… mixed. Some found its magical realism too grating, its tone too bleak. I get it. Grief is a messy, chaotic, and frankly, boring subject for some. It’s inconvenient. It’s ugly.
But this trailer? This trailer is a sledgehammer. It condenses that sprawling, messy emotion into a devastating two-minute package. It suggests a film that isn’t afraid to be difficult, to personify the unbearable, and to ask if we have to befriend our own demons just to survive them. The official trailer on YouTube is worth your time, if only to see a major actor fully commit to the beautiful, terrifying absurdity of sorrow.
Maybe the film itself stumbles. Maybe the metaphor overwhelms the narrative. But the ambition on display here… it’s breathtaking. It’s the kind of swing we should be begging filmmakers to take.
The Thing With Feathers: Your Quick Guide
🖤 The Grief-Demon: At its core, the film adapts Max Porter’s novel, personifying grief as a literal, talking crow that moves into a widower’s home—a brilliant and brutal metaphor for how loss occupies space.
🎬 Festival Darling to Theatrical Release: After its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and a showing at the Berlin Film Festival, it’s headed to the London Film Festival before a November 28, 2025 theatrical release.
🧌 Practical Magic: The Crow is a practical effect, not a CGI creation, designed by Conor O’Sullivan. The trailer’s restraint in not fully revealing him builds a far more potent and psychological dread.
🎭 Cumberbatch Unleashed: Benedict Cumberbatch as “Dad” delivers a performance of profound, hollowed-out anguish, pitched against the taunting, gritty voice work of Eric Lampaert as Crow.
So, what do you think? Is this a profound look at loss, or a pretentious misstep? I’m leaning heavily towards the former, but I need to see it to be sure. The conversation starts now.
