Latest news with #GriefistheThingwithFeathers
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Dua Lipa Turns Heads With Stunning Red Outfit
Dua Lipa is continuing to trend on social media for her stunning outfits on tour. The 29-year-old pop star is currently in the middle of her Radical Optimism tour. The tour started in Singapore in November of 2024 and it's scheduled to wrap up in Mexico City in December of 2025. Dua Lipa and her crew are currently in Auckland, New Zealand. Dua Lipa turned heads with her sizzling red outfit, shared to Instagram following her latest tour stop on Wednesday evening. "Auckland Night 1 💋," she wrote. Dua Lipa has opened up about how she winds down on tour, too. She enjoys a good book. The pop star has been reading "Grief is the Thing with Feathers," a novel by Max Porter. "It's the story of a young family devastated by grief when the boys' mother suddenly dies. As the weight of their grief threatens to sink them, a human-size crow arrives on their doorstep and moves in, announcing that he will stay until they no longer need him. Yes, you read that right – a giant talking crow. Is Crow here to help, or purely to cause chaos? Is he even real or a figment of their imagination? That's the question that carries through the book but, by the end, it barely matters, as his purpose becomes clearer," she wrote. "It might take you a second to get into the voice of Crow but once you are, you are in for a treat. Grief Is The Thing With Feathers is definitely a book where you really just have to surrender to the story – take it from me, let yourself go and enjoy the wild ride." Dua Lipa goes through a lot while performing on stage, so it's cool to see that she chooses to wind down by looking through a good book.
Telegraph
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Thing with Feathers: Benedict Cumberbatch's surreal horror is a squawking misfire
Some books cast a spell, which must be what attracted Benedict Cumberbatch to star in The Thing with Feathers. But that doesn't mean they're destined to make great films, however honest everyone's aims, and diligent their acting. Writer-director Dylan Southern turns a very literary tour de force into cinema that clomps, languishes and squawks 'METAPHOR!' with almost no plot to motor it along. On the page, the conceit of Max Porter's 2015 debut novella Grief is the Thing with Feathers – that of a giant crow presiding over a widower's bereavement – was certainly a flex, showing promising gumption. Lo and behold, Porter's next novel Lanny (2019) was altogether wondrous. The former book has already been adapted for the stage, in a well-liked 2018 version by Enda Walsh, starring Cillian Murphy. Southern wants to meet Porter's achievement anew, but it's an almighty hurdle to set himself as a first-time feature director. The supposed climax becomes a hellscape in all the wrong ways, as well as an unwieldy genre hybrid, about one-third of the way (but no more) to Babadook-esque horror. As a straight grief drama, which is how things start, The Thing with Feathers does make some gritty inroads – which is kind of impressive, given how weirdly unspecific it all is. Cumberbatch is a grieving father, unnamed except as 'Dad' by his two young sons (Henry and Richard Boxall). His late wife has collapsed in a freak accident at home and died; he found the body. While concealing his full devastation to preserve a sense of normality, he can't handle the small things: putting milk in the fridge, not burning the toast, stopping these tykes trundling all over him. He's an illustrator, which cues up his black feathered nemesis, Crow, to make a looming leap off the page. After the Netflix drama Eric, which paired Cumberbatch with an imaginary blue puppet monster that helped his character cope with losing his son, we perhaps need to call time now on him sharing the screen with lumbering personifications of emotion. This man-sized corvine figment rasps in the voice of David Thewlis – who else? – and taunts him as a 'Sad Dad' hitting the bottle. Alas, the relationship being sold between Crow and Dad's grief is so hammeringly obvious it gives the film nowhere to go but down. Southern directs the young brothers well – there's a degree of spite to their rough-housing that's believable. And Cumberbatch, who has never phoned in any performance I've seen, 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. The lighting in the house turns sickly; the iffily designed creature starts flapping around in a frenzy; the viewer feels nothing. There's no way Southern can lift us out of this pit of despond, which is what Porter's flair for literary invention did. It's a grim situation – like watching a film peck at its own entrails.
Reuters
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Reuters
Benedict Cumberbatch unexpectedly sideswiped by grief in 'Thing With Feathers' drama
BERLIN, Feb 18 (Reuters) - Benedict Cumberbatch was overtaken by grief at unexpected moments while playing a widower in his new family drama "The Thing With Feathers," the British actor said on Tuesday in Berlin. "Odd moments would just sideswipe me," Cumberbatch told journalists about the film, playing in the Berlin Film Festival's non-competitive Special section. He recalled how one scene of his character folding his dead wife's clothes and putting them in a box caught him off guard. "I'm 48. I've been through a bit. I've lived. I've experienced grief," he said. "It just really struck a chord." Cumberbatch stars as the father of two young sons whose wife has unexpectedly died, and he begins to receive visits from a large, otherworldly crow figure that eventually forces the family to confront their grief. Part of the role involved letting go and not trying to control what grief should look like, said Cumberbatch, who made a name for himself by playing Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Strange. "It sounds perverse when talking about grief, but as far as the artistry of making something feel or look or be real in that moment for a character, you just leave it alone and it happens," he said. The film, which was adapted from the book "Grief is the Thing with Feathers" by Max Porter, is British filmmaker Dylan Southern's debut fiction feature. "I had never read anything like it, it's so dense with kind of profound ideas and character detail, but it's packed into a tiny little novella," Southern told Reuters about the book. The director of documentaries such as "No Distance Left to Run," about the band Blur, said he wanted to capture the experience of grieving with the family that the book conveys. "It was kind of a challenging but really rewarding kind of project to dive into," he said.
The Guardian
26-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Thing with Feathers review – Benedict Cumberbatch's grief horror falls apart
The messiness of grief, something most of us know too well, has been given a smoothing effect on screen, an experience so awful and unpleasant made easily, annoyingly palatable. The cliches that have come to define it have become so normalised that we often forget what it's really like to see the horrible, frightening reality shown to us. On the page, and stage, Max Porter's novella Grief is the Thing with Feathers was for many, a fantastical yet identifiable story of loss, the tale of a father losing his wife transformed into a dark, magical fable of transformative horror. Its central conceit – a giant crow haunting the aftermath of death – was such a compelling visual that, despite the pitfalls that come with adapting something so beloved, the big screen felt like a natural next step. In his introduction before the adaptation's late-night Sundance premiere, writer and director Dylan Southern (whose work has previously focused on music documentaries) informed us that this would be no traditional grief drama, a subgenre one has come to often glumly expect from the festival. This would be something far more unusual. But The Thing with Feathers, a film that uses the word grief so much already that it was wisely removed from the title, is not as radical as those behind it might like to think. It's actually surprisingly, sometimes boringly, conventional, not just as a grounded drama of loss but as a metaphorical horror too, a trend that was given a new lease of life with 2014's The Babadook, which also premiered at Sundance (Benedict Cumberbatch's father even reads his sons a story involving the similar-sounding tale of the Slavic creature Baba Yaga, a perhaps unwise pre-bedtime choice given its themes). While Jennifer Kent found a way to make her film operate so effectively on both levels, Southern just can't figure out the right balance. It's never scary or jolting enough as a horror or as emotionally investing or psychologically insightful as it should be as a drama. What's crucially missing is detail, both in the characters themselves and the weight of what they're going through, red flags all the way up in an overly familiar introductory stretch following the unseen funeral. Cumberbatch's unnamed Dad is struggling already, forgetting the milk and burning the toast, his late wife having taken on 'everything' before she died. While a more traditionally common dynamic that it should be, there's not much interrogation of this unfair imbalance and what it really means for who the character was and now has to be (bar one flashback to Dad taking out his young sons in the snow in improper attire). There's nothing lived-in about Southern's recycled view of Dad's grief – screaming down the phone, refusing to clean the kitchen, dealing with well-intentioned yet inappropriate offers of support – and also nothing to remember about the anonymously written wife and mother who has gone, described as someone kind who smelled nice. The arrival of a menacing creature is therefore a desperately needed uplift as Dad starts to lose his grip on reality, faced with a David Thewlis-voiced menace, mocking him as he tries to push his new life on, caring for his two interchangeable sons while working on his latest graphic novel. But there's no real progress or substance to the confusingly paced relationship, a repetitive cycle of ineffective jump scares and smugly sardonic putdowns that fail to show how Dad is benefitting or changing from this new addition to the family. Like the book, the film is sectioned (Dad, Boys, Crow and Demon) and while a perspective shift seems to follow each time, it soon fades and we're back in the same, increasingly uninteresting, routine (the arrival of the wonderful Vinette Robinson is also sadly just a brief tease). There's a proudly absurd streak to many of the scenes (Southern used the word 'ridiculous' before the film) with Cumberbatch dancing and fighting with Crow while also taking on elements of his sounds and physicality himself. But it all feels a little dated, not as anarchic or as twisted as it's presented as, and somehow far less effective than something that's far less pretentious like Venom. Like Tom Hardy in those films, Cumberbatch is admirably committed yet the rather embarrassing silliness he's forced into can't be pulled off, especially since it remains unclear what or who Crow really is and wants, a character as underwritten as Dad. Cumberbatch's performance is certainly all-in but restricted by the limited nature of the script – cry, scream, scribble, repeat – and so he's left as visibly exhausted as we are. What one hopes for in a film about something so utterly terrible is that sink of sadness to set in, the pang that makes you feel for those you're watching while maybe also thinking of those you've lost yourself. The worst thing about The Thing with Feathers, a film that's supposedly about the all-consuming horror of grief, is that it never comes, not even for a second, a story about loss that fatally loses us first. The Thing with Feathers is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
