The article critiques the film adaptation of Max Porter's novella Grief is the Thing with Feathers, arguing it compresses the rawness of grief into a conventional narrative. Unlike the original work, which presents a fantastical and dark exploration of loss through the metaphor of a giant crow, the film adaptation fails to capture this depth. Dylan Southern, the director, aims for a unique approach to the grief genre but ultimately delivers a product that feels mundane and lacks the emotional engagement or fear that the topic demands.
The cliches that have come to define grief have become so normalized that we often forget what it's really like to see the horrible, frightening reality.
Southern just can't figure out the right balance, making it neither scary enough as a horror nor emotionally investing as a drama.
The Thing with Feathers, a film that uses the word grief so much already that it was wisely removed from the title, is not as radical as those behind it might like to think.
Max Porter's novella was for many a fantastical yet identifiable story of loss, transformed into a dark, magical fable of transformative horror.
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