Benedict Cumberbatch Faces a Haunting Crow in ‘The Thing With Feathers’

Benedict Cumberbatch is stepping into one of modern literature’s strangest houses of grief. The actor leads The Thing with Feathers, a new film adaptation of Max Porter’s acclaimed novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, which turns raw mourning into a dark, crow‑haunted fable.

The film, directed by Dylan Southern, premiered at Sundance 2025 and later screened at Berlinale, positioning it as one of the year’s most high‑profile literary adaptations. A review at RogerEbert.com notes that Southern leans hard into horror tropes, including jump scares, in a story that started life as a delicate, experimental work of poetic fiction.

Crows, Grief and a Missing Poet

Porter’s 2015 book follows a widowed father and his two young sons whose home is invaded by a giant, talking crow that may be figment, guardian, tormentor—or all three. Porter, an award‑winning English writer, is known for hybrid prose‑poetry that tackles grief, family and myth in slim but emotionally packed volumes.

In the novel, the father is a scholar obsessed with Ted Hughes’ landmark collection Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, a link that roots the bird in real‑world literary and biographical history, including the tragic lives of Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Critics argue that by changing Cumberbatch’s character into a graphic novelist and dropping the Hughes connection, the film risks making the crow feel more random and less symbolically rich.

This isn’t the first time Porter’s bruising little book has left the page. Enda Walsh adapted it for a 2019 stage production starring Cillian Murphy, drawing praise for capturing the text’s strange, lyrical rhythms onstage. Now, Southern’s movie joins a growing wave of genre‑bending page‑to‑screen projects, from Netflix romances to prestige fantasy epics. Recent adaptations like Netflix’s take on Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams show just how wide the tonal range of book‑to‑film projects has become.

Where This Fits in the Adaptation Boom

Briarcliff picked up U.S. rights to The Thing with Feathers after its Sundance premiere, betting on both Cumberbatch’s appeal and the story’s eerie hook. The movie’s blend of domestic drama, psychological horror and literary backstory puts it in conversation with films like The Babadook, which used a monster to explore mental illness and parental fear.

It also lands in the middle of a busy era for book adaptations aimed squarely at devoted readers. Rom‑com fans are watching closely as Emily Henry’s novels head to the screen—Henry recently teased extra Poppy and Alex moments in the People We Meet on Vacation film, sparking debate over book‑to‑movie changes in softer, swoonier territory than Porter’s crow‑laced grief.

For poetry lovers and lit‑fiction readers, though, The Thing with Feathers may be the adaptation to watch. Its roots run from Emily Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” to Ted Hughes’ brutal, transformative Crow, refracted through Porter’s experimental prose. Whether Southern’s horror‑leaning version captures that lineage—or loses it in the shadows—will likely be a key question as more readers seek out the film after discovering the book.