Dylan Southern and Benedict Cumberbatch at the premiere of “The Thing With Feathers” (photo by George Pimentel / Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Bailey Pennick
Sometimes you don’t know that you’re not okay until you see your experience reflected through art. For Dylan Southern, Max Porter’s novella Grief Is the Thing With Feathers changed his life. “The journey [of this film] started years ago when I read a book that blew me away,” explains the writer-director as he introduces his fiction feature debut to a full Eccles crowd on January 25. “It made me realize that I was carrying around some things with me.” While the form of our grief might take all different shapes, we all continue to carry it within us.
The Thing With Feathers, Southern’s cinematic adaptation of Porter’s book, follows Dad (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his two young boys after their mother dies suddenly. Absolutely in shock, Dad tries to keep everything in order while throwing himself deeper and deeper into his work as a graphic novelist. However, one of his creations — a gigantic crow (voiced by David Thewlis) — has left the confines of the page and entrenched itself into Dad’s waking life. It’s alarming at times and quite funny at others, ebbing and flowing without any set parameters, in the same way that grief will sneak up on you.
In the post-premiere Q&A, the writer-director notes that this elusive quality of grief’s description in the book is what led him to make Feathers more of a genre film. “Max’s book was kind of terrifying in places, really funny in other places, heartbreaking in certain places, messy, you know,” Southern explains. “I feel like starting in a horror space felt right because the initial stages of grief feel like horror, you know? You’re dislocated from your world… this thing that’s so shocking has just happened to you [and] you don’t know what’s coming next, so it was very obvious to lean into that at the beginning… I think horror immediately allows you into something where that landscape opens up into something very meaty and real and viscous and disgusting. The mess of grief, the mess of life.”
This mess is what drew Cumberbatch to the project in the first place: “It’s a kind of feast for an actor — so many different challenges and tones to play with — so a lot to lure me into the project.” Cumberbatch also jumped into a behind-the-scenes role to bring Southern’s vision to life. “To produce it and try and harness this amazing talent onto the big screen for his first debut fictional feature, that’s a huge privilege and I can’t thank you enough. It’s been a wonderful ride!”
