Sundance film festival: An unaffecting adaptation of Max Porter’s acclaimed novella is perched awkwardly between fantasy and reality, failing to convince on either level

The messiness of grief, something most of us know too well, has been given a smoothing effect on screen, an experience so awful and unpleasant made easily, annoyingly palatable. The cliches that have come to define it have become so normalised that we often forget what it’s really like to see the horrible, frightening reality shown to us. On the page, and stage, Max Porter’s novella Grief is the Thing with Feathers was for many, a fantastical yet identifiable story of loss, the tale of a father losing his wife transformed into a dark, magical fable of transformative horror. Its central conceit – a giant crow haunting the aftermath of death – was such a compelling visual that, despite the pitfalls that come with adapting something so beloved, the big screen felt like a natural next step.

In his introduction before the adaptation’s late-night Sundance premiere, writer and director Dylan Southern (whose work has previously focused on music documentaries) informed us that this would be no traditional grief drama, a subgenre one has come to often glumly expect from the festival. This would be something far more unusual.

The Thing with Feathers is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution