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Benedict at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival: ”The Thing with Feathers” premiere and reviews

This post of our Sundance 2025 series is dedicated to the The Thing with Feathers world premiere at the festival on January 25th! Here you’ll find pictures, videos and the first reviews of the film. For the red carpet interviews, please check out this post.

Pictures

Videos

Q&A from two different angles:

Benedict leaving after the screening:

https://twitter.com/midnytemercury/status/1883710518365667455

Reviews

These are spoiler-free excerpts from the first reviews to come out after the premiere. Please click on the name of the source to be redirected to the full review, but please beware of spoilers!

Variety

When Benedict Cumberbatch enacts a moment like this, you can bet that you’re not just seeing an actor cry; you’re seeing him act with every tear. Cumberbatch, in a few moments, expresses the depth of this father’s agony, the terrifying chasm of it.

The Hollywood Reporter

The main salvation is the staggering commitment of Benedict Cumberbatch, hurling himself into the role of a bereaved husband in a performance touched by madness that holds nothing back. His wounds are gashes continually being reopened.

Deadline

The Thing with Feathers will likely prove divisive; for survivors of trauma, it will likely be cathartic, but for others more fortunate, its pitch-perfect portrayal of loss might be a touch too uncomfortable.

[…]

As a work of art, The Thing with Feathers is something special, a fantastic calling card for an auteur in waiting. As a movie, however, it won’t (and maybe can’t) be for everyone; an essay on mortality that beguiles with its beauty and stings with the truth.

Screen Daily

Luring them in will be Cumberbatch’s full-throttle performance — this is the best he has been in years – and the physicality of the piece, from his body’s oddly avian contortions to the summoning of the crow itself

[…]

Although some will avoid, there are many, especially those who have suffered a devastating loss, who could find common ground here, with Cumberbatch’s fine performance as a person coming to terms with all he has lost. Above all, Feathers is a genuine tribute to that process.

The Playlist

Not all established documentary filmmakers make the jump to narrative features gracefully, but whatever your thoughts on “The Thing With Features,” you certainly won’t question whether Dylan Southern has a vision. “Feathers,” his first friction work, debuted at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival this weekend and gleefully pushes the envelope in both genre and tone. That being said, despite a committed performance from Benedict Cumberbatch, the end result truly doesn’t coalesce either from an artistic or cinematic perspective.

The Guardian

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.

Roger Ebert

Despite building to some impressive imagery, Southern’s film takes forever to get where it’s going, forcing an admittedly committed Cumberbatch to play miserable confusion for ages before the film finally finds the imagery to support his journey.

Vulture

Whenever the camera focuses on Cumberbatch, however, things clarify. A talented guy with a seductive voice and wonderfully dissonant face, the actor has sometimes struggled to find the right parts: His demeanor tempts people into casting him as oddballs, but really, he’s at his best when he’s playing confused, ordinary men. 

[…] the resulting genre mélange, uneasy and uninvolving, doesn’t help the story he’s trying to tell. And it comes dangerously close to wasting one of Benedict Cumberbatch’s greatest performances.

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