Max Porter’s novel "Grief is the Thing with Feathers" (2015) has been gracing all good bookshops for a decade now: an unmissable presence at the "themed" tables or staff picks. Consequently, I have leafed through its pages several times, enough to glean that the story is about the death of a woman who leaves behind bereaved children and a husband and how a winged creature, a crow, appears in their lives to calibrate their feelings. It always seemed like the sort of book that commanded reverence before anyone had even opened it.

The 21st century has been marked by a campaign to acknowledge all manner of feelings and you can find any number of videos on social media about how important it is to give time and space to all the emotions we feel. Anger and grief are among these "negative" emotions that we are asked every day to attend to more heartily. In order not to be quite so obvious, the film adaptation of the novel drops the ‘grief’ from the title and we are to make out what this feathered thing that has appeared on the screen is.

The thing that drew me to "The Thing with Feathers" was the chance to see a tortured Benedict Cumberbatch in his natural habitat, and to erase the images of the film "The Roses" (2025) that we’ve been exposed to for a while now. And he delivers, and so does the house where the film is shot. As in some of my favourite stories, the home here is a character in itself and although the space is threatened both by "the Crow" and "the Demon" at intervals, it felt nice to be ensconced in that soothing space of the English middle-class home. The film knows that interiors can be both sanctuary and indictment.

The informed liberal middle classness of it all hit me when "the Dad" reads a Baba Yaga story to the two boys to help them sleep. I knew a couple who lived in the same house, had the same kitchenware and had a Russian nanny so that the (exactly the same) kids would grow up learning a second language. I have often wondered if they regret having done so now, seeing that Russians have moved from the category of rich clients to barbaric enemies in the British and European imagination. I quite like the fact that, despite geopolitical changes, in this depiction of the middle class, things Russian retain their aura of learned, sophisticated taste. As I sit in the cinema smug in my ability to parse these markers of class, the film does one better, and the Crow "accuses" the Dad of being a cliche: "Guardian reading, Farmer’s Market, widow music." "The Thing with Feathers" wears its class so much on the sleeve, in fact, that this line takes center stage in the trailer.

You could say I am engaging in just that sort of denial that the film advises against – losing myself in detail rather than face Grief in the face. In the film, the Dad is an illustrator and the cinematography does beautiful things with the black ink he’s drawing with and the appearance of the feathered creature. The music and the lighting often turn the film into a high psychological thriller. David Thewlis as the voice of the Crow is both menacing and fatherly at the same time. It is the kind of grief that arrives wearing good manners and then refuses to leave. For a long while, the intentions of the Crow are not quite clear, but then, when the Demon appears, we know there are darker forces than Grief at work. The Demon and the Crow fight it out, at times reminiscent of creature face-offs in Marvel films. Considering the fact that the novel is quite short, it is really up to the director to choose what moments they will highlight and how they will pace the emotional transformation of our characters. The boys, played by Richard Boxall and Henry Boxall, are a delight to watch, and of course, the reason why we are really rooting for Benedict Cumberbatch’s character to come through.

All things considered, then, my self-absorbed reason for watching the film, that is to spend time in English interiors, does not seem so wrong because of the way the Crow keeps taunting the Dad as the "English widower" as if it were some kind of slur. One can probably write an anthropological review of how this Dad would not have been given this private space to mourn in other cultures, but the film convinces me that in the end, the battle must be a personal one. In the end, it is not through conversations with the well-intentioned family and friends that the Dad can contain his Grief, but through grappling with it on his own. Indeed, after both he and the children do their own battles with it that they can actually come together on the living room sofa. It is then up to the viewer to decide whether the film has earned this moment of accommodation with grief.