“The Thing with Feathers” is exploring grief in its most shadowy stages.

Screened at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, the thriller stars Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch as a father of two mourning the unexpected loss of his wife. As his grief manifests into a dark presence, he gradually loses his sense of reality in the family’s shared apartment. Acclaimed director Dylan Southern adapted the screenplay from Max Porter’s 2015 novella “Grief Is the Thing with Feathers.” A decade after the book’s publication, Southern’s film premiered in Park City, Utah.

Porter spoke with the Daily Bruin’s Victoria Munck at the Sundance premiere press line about the adaptation of his writing and his admiration of Southern’s cinematic perspective.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Daily Bruin: In your author’s statement, you mentioned that you really appreciated Dylan’s attention to detail in directing this film adaptation. Can you think of something small in this movie that audiences might not notice but that you found significant?

Max Porter: I mean, almost anything. Off the top of my head, there’s a passage in the book where the child – who is aged to be an adult – remembers the fact that when he most missed his mom, he most wanted to hurt his dad. And so he smashes his prized John Coltrane poster. And Dylan had the John Coltrane poster in the flat, and there’s a moment when it smashed, and I really appreciated the literal preservation of the iconographic part of the book. So there’s loads of those moments in the film.

There’s one moment where the child places his hand on the father’s back, and in that 1.6-second instant, I felt more understood as a writer than I have in a long time. It was very beautiful.

DB: The process of bringing the complex character of Crow from page to screen seems fascinating. How do you feel about his presence in this adaptation, and what works about it?

MP: What works about it is that he’s in one moment terrifying, in one moment ludicrous. He’s silly, and the children are laughing at him, and you’re like, “This most terrifying manifestation of the most upsetting thing that could ever happen to you is laughable?” And that’s so odd as a viewer. You don’t know whether to be frightened or scared, and that in itself is very much like grief.

You’re like, “Why am I feeling this way?” It’s taboo, it’s uncharted territory, it’s totally fresh – and in a weird way, it’s exhilarating. The deep depth, the kind of chasm that you’re in that has no vocabulary, it’s beyond language. And Crow does that. He’s a man in a suit, but he’s also a monster, but he’s also an animatronic thing, but he’s also a figment of your imagination. So, the unfixedness of him – I … love.