'The Thing With Feathers' Sets October Release Date

Though most people view film festivals as industry celebrations full of celebrity appearances, nonstop premieres, and reports of those weird fifteen-minute-long standing ovations that inevitably happen at events like Cannes or Sundance, they're primarily a business opportunity. While some of the buzziest titles arrive at festivals intending to kick off award season campaigns (Conclave premiered at Telluride, for example), most are there looking for a major studio to help fund distribution and marketing efforts. Making movies is expensive!

This year's Sundance Film Festival, occurring so soon after the Los Angeles wildfires, was a bit of an odd beast. So it makes sense that there weren't many huge acquisitions or bidding wars for specific titles, and the whole process feels slower than normal. Of the sixty films that came into the festival looking for homes, a little over a dozen have found them to date. But the year is long and hope is not lost. Briarcliff Entertainment only just announced that it snagged the U.S. distribution rights to The Thing with Feathers, one of the biggest world premieres at the festival and a title with a fairly prestige pedigree behind it.

The film is based on Max Porter’s prize-winning 2015 novella Grief is the Thing with Feathers, and stars Benedict Cumberbatch (The Roses) as a father struggling to process the sudden death of his wife. A folk horror-tinged exploration of sorrow, his family's grief is mad extremely literal (and sometimes quite malevolent) in the form of a giant crow that moves into their home uninvited.