The Thing With Feathers may be based on a book, but it also takes inspiration from an unlikely source — the album cover of the Who's 1979 album, The Kids Are Alright. The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on Saturday night,

The actor is at his best, most alive and inventive here. But The Thing With Feathers doesn’t know what kind of movie to be.

Crow never becomes a gripping character; he's too sternly abstract, too hectoring, too much of a visual effect in search of a personality.

Dylan Southern adapts the Max Porter novella, ‘Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,’ about a widowed father and the menacing giant crow that attaches itself to his sorrow.