Benedict Cumberbatch carries newcomer British director Dylan Southern’s stylistically distinct but narratively uneven psychological drama.

| Apr 1, 2025

At one moment it feels like a horror movie with a jump scare and then it abandons such attempts to full drama. Benedict Cumberbatch is good as are the child actors but it doesn’t come together.

| Mar 7, 2025

Cumberbatch is flawless in his portrayal of Dad, conveying with his expressions and posture the delicate nature of hurt the screenplay couldn’t, but it’s unfair to rely on his talents alone to deliver a story this multifaceted.

| Mar 6, 2025

Unfairly maligned out of Sundance. Yes, it’s a big performance, but as anyone who has lost a loved one knows, despair is no pretty business

| Feb 26, 2025

[Cumberbatch] is doing everything he can to keep the film in touch with reality. But the problems are insurmountable. The material is just so ill-suited to this unpoetic quasi-horror approach.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 25, 2025

When a film has the power to elicit such an intense, raw and even therapeutic response, that has to be acknowledged, and it becomes so much more important than any storytelling flaws.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 21, 2025

Anyone who has had an experience with loss will most likely deeply resonate with The Thing with Feathers; they’re up for a harrowing and distressing, yet somewhat cathartic viewing.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 14, 2025

More metaphor than movie.

| Feb 10, 2025

Cumberbatch’s haggardly expressive face could tell the story alone, but Southern keeps resorting to jump-scares and cage-match fracases with the crow.

| Feb 8, 2025

"The Thing With Feathers" puts a unique spin on a story about processing loss, but it leans too much into physical manifestations of the psychological and moves away from its most emotionally impactful aspects.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Feb 5, 2025

The thinly veiled metaphor ends up robbing the story of all emotional power – fulfilling the opposite of its intention. Cumberbatch throws himself into the role of a father dealing with loss, but the film severely miscalculates what it wants from him.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Feb 4, 2025

With an all-in performance from Benedict Cumberbatch and a unique visual style, The Thing With Feathers is an inescapably compelling drama — even if its concept is perhaps a bit more interesting than its execution.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 3, 2025

There’s this warm, fable-like fantasticality about Crow’s gallows bluntness that carries Southern’s film. The Thing with Feathers wraps us in the wings of grief as we fall into its nastiest depths, and lifts us out with gothic hopecore appeal.

| Original Score: 7.0/10 | Feb 3, 2025

Southern adapts Porter’s novel with poetic elegance, but it's too restrained emotionally for its stagnant and familiar depiction of a family tormented by grief turned into a literal horror show.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 3, 2025

Southern’s creative style and direction to manifest grief onscreen interconnects with the horror genre, it's just not entirely effective.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Feb 1, 2025

Grim, but Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent

| Jan 30, 2025

The Thing With Feathers is essential viewing for families, and its deft take on loss and healing never obscures the fact that sometimes, the Crow won’t move out, and that’s okay.

| Original Score: 8.5/10 | Jan 30, 2025

The Thing With Feathers’s overt and aggressive approach to its central metaphor may not connect with everyone, but plenty will connect with its creative yet empathetic way of handling grief.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jan 30, 2025

If you feel the film is a metaphor for Emily Dickinson’s poem, "Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers,” that’s what Porter is trying to get at. The film also understands this, but gives into the expectations of what theatrical horror is expected to be.

| Jan 29, 2025

It takes far too long for the generational talent to demonstrate any true range to his character and that’s on the script, not Cumberbatch.

| Original Score: C+ | Jan 28, 2025