Gluttons for emotional punishment would do properly to hunt out Dylan Southern’s The Factor with Feathers, an ickily-stylised display screen adaptation of Max Porter’s hit 2019 novel ‘Grief is a Factor with Feathers’. It’s telling that they’ve eliminated the advertising and marketing turn-off time period “grief” from the title, however the reality is, you’d must have a media literacy rating of minus 3000 to not get what this movie is promoting, as a ghostly humanoid crow verbally harangues and demeans a father and his two youngsters within the direct wake of their spouse/mom’s sudden loss of life.
And that grief is laid on with an over-sized trowel because the we’ve got Benedict Cumberbatch doing wall-to-wall ugly crying as a cartoonist (don’t say “graphic novelist,” as apparently it sounds wanky) who’s compelled to resist his manifold deficiencies as a main carer and is introduced (fairly wankily) because the archetype “Dad”. His two younger “Boys” (Richard and Henry Boxall) can’t actually comprehend the gravity of the state of affairs, and there’s an prompt and shifting conflict when Dad realises that there’s little widespread understanding in the home at this second of chic rupture.
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In the course of the lengthy, boozy nights of contemplation and fear that the world can by no means be the identical once more, Dad is jolted out of his reverie by the loud knock of a hen Kamikaze-diving into the window (à la Hitchcock’s The Birds), clearly attempting to invade the home and, ultimately, get into the heads of all of the inhabitants. Finally, all this malevolent wildlife manifests as Crow, a hunched, lifesized crow voiced by David Thewlis who’s channeling an much more aggressive, irritating and comically Northern model of his character Johnny from Bare. The movie is cut up into chapters which element how Dad and the Boys work together with Crow and the way, by Crow’s oppressive rantings, everyone seems to be ultimately dragged in the direction of some semblance of comprehension and peace.
The place the story works within the pages of the novel as a literary machine that may be imagined by the reader, presenting a display screen model with an precise bodily presence utterly drains any nuance from the story. Doing it this manner in some way seems like the straightforward manner out, each diluting and formalising a complicated technique of therapeutic that’s doubtless going to be completely different for everybody who experiences it. The movie so desperately needs you to shed tears alongside its crestfallen protagonists, but the veneer of toughness (which often comes throughout as horror-adjacent) covers a coronary heart that’s wholly sentimental.
One other facet that sticks within the craw is the concept that this prevalence permits Dad to hover haughtily above his friends and acquaintances, and there are quite a few awkward scenes of individuals providing to assist as Cumberbatch demures, questioning how anybody may even start to fathom his dismal headspace. Empathy and civility are cynically dismissed as performative and self-soothing, as if the movie needs you solely to imagine within the restorative strategies that it’s promoting. There’s a few respectable performances within the combine (the youngsters particularly), and Cumberbatch goes all-in (after which some) on the idea, however in any other case this flails as saccharine self-help cinema with none actual sense of genuine human behaviour.
