The last thing you need when your spouse has just died and you can hardly lift your head, let alone get your young boys to school on time, is an eight-foot crow squawking abuse. But that’s just what Benedict Cumberbatch’s nameless widower has to contend with in director Dylan Southern’s narrative feature debut, The Thing With Feathers . There are physical attacks, too, with a talon-slash here, a beak-gouge there, and pummelling wing-slaps everywhere else.

The assaultive crow in question — designed by Nicola Hicks, played by Eric Lampaert, and voiced by David Thewlis, who brings something of his tirades in Mike Leigh’s Naked to the (bird) table — is a metaphor, of course. Or rather a ‘metaphorror’, given this mournful drama leans into genre territory, recalling Jennifer Kent’s The

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