H Is For Hawk review: Claire Foy is superb in this soaring study of grief - but be warned, it's a challenging watch

• e-mail

H Is For Hawk (12A, 114 mins)

Brian Viner

Rating:

There are various ways, in the movies as in life, of tackling grief. The old man in Pixar’s film Up (2009) did it by taking a trip. Less helpfully as it turned out, so did the couple played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now (1973).

In Field Of Dreams (1989), Kevin Costner turned to baseball. In the recently-released Hamnet, Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare buries himself in writing his great tragedy, Hamlet.

In H Is For Hawk, a true story, Helen Macdonald (Claire Foy) tries something else. Struggling to process the sudden, unexpected death of her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson), she devotes herself to training a goshawk, which becomes her most precious companion. She calls it Mabel.

This visceral connection with nature, red in tooth and especially claw, relieves her pain. But it doesn’t offer any glib answers.

Based on a 2014 memoir by naturalist Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk stars Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson

Claire Foy - who notably starred as Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown - portrays Helen in the movie

In adapting Macdonald’s bestselling 2014 memoir, Philippa Lowthorpe (the director and co-writer, with Emma Donoghue) does not shy away from depicting Helen as a complex character: easy enough to empathise with, but not necessarily to like. She ruffles feathers, you might say.

In different hands – Disney’s, for example – the story might have been softened and given a clearer trajectory from intense pain to total catharsis.

But Lowthorpe has created a smarter picture than that, more demanding of its audience, probably less commercial than it could have been, but all the better for it.

It is set in 2007. Helen is a chain-smoking academic at Cambridge University who, since girlhood, has shared a fascination for birds of prey with her father, Alisdair. The two share a sense of humour, too, chirpily trading Groucho Marx one-liners. 

Her dad is the only person who truly understands her, making H Is For Hawk a welcome addition to the short list of powerful films about the father-daughter bond. Of recent offerings I commend Aftersun (2022) to you, but there really aren’t that many.

Alisdair (nicknamed Ali Mac) is a renowned newspaper photographer who has seen and snapped it all, but still can’t stop working... to the detriment, it is implied, of his health.

Helen adores him and is blindsided with grief after taking a call from her mother (Lindsay ­Duncan) to say that he has ­collapsed and died. From this point, we must rely on flashbacks to understand the connection between Helen and her dad.

Her relationship with her mother is much more brittle. There is a brother, too, who barely utters a word. In fact for a while I thought he might be mute.

But it’s Duncan’s character who serves to remind Helen of what she has lost. ‘Dad wouldn’t want us to mope, would he,’ says her mum, briskly.

Actually, moping is not the half of it. At one point it looks as if Helen might find comfort in romance, but the man she takes home is spooked by all the emotional self-help books lying around.

She also has a decent and concerned best mate, a fellow academic (Denise Gough), but human interaction is not what she craves. She decides to share her life with a goshawk, travelling up to her father’s native Scotland to buy one.

Back in the Cambridgeshire countryside, a friend (Sam ­Spruell), a bird-of-prey expert, gives her lessons.

By all accounts, Foy did plenty of intense training in real life, so the scenes in which she handles Mabel, with burgeoning authority, are compellingly authentic (and exquisitely shot).

As she bonds with the bird, her teaching suffers – and so does her personal hygiene – making H Is For Hawk an increasingly ­challenging watch. 

The story does not unfold as I expected, but then grief rarely does. Which might be the whole point. Whatever, it’s a very worthwhile film, with a superb performance from Foy at its heart.

Matthew Bond

Rating:

When Helen Macdonald’s book, H Is For Hawk, came out a decade or so ago, I wasn’t keen. It sounded too much the standard grief memoir – beloved parent dies, adult child is plunged into grief only to take up an eccentric hobby that provides solace, healing and eventually a book deal. Too cynical? Well maybe, as it turns out.

And that’s because Philippa Lowthorpe’s screen adaptation doesn’t follow this standard arc. Yes, Helen’s adored father, a newspaper photographer and keen amateur naturalist, played here by Brendan Gleeson, dies early on and, yes, Helen, a Cambridge academic played by The Crown’s Claire Foy, swiftly decides that what she needs to counter her overwhelming sadness is a hawk – a goshawk, in fact, one of nature’s finest killers.

The first welcome surprise is that Helen knows what she’s doing – she and her father had owned and flown a kestrel when she was growing up. It was one of the things that brought them close. 

The story - based on real events - follows Helen tending to a Goshawk after her father Alisdair's death

The cast also includes supporting performances from co-stars including Lindsay Duncan (pictured, left), who plays Helen's mother

But this time, she insists, she wants a serious hunting bird. ‘I don’t want a lady’s bird, I want a goshawk.’ It’s from the moment her new hawk, soon christened Mabel, first takes to the skies, that this film properly takes off. 

The flying sequences are fabulous. Except for the rabbits and pheasants unfortunate enough to get in Mabel’s way.

But the film hasn’t finished with its surprises. Without giving too much away, Mabel, at least as a feathery form of therapy, doesn’t really work. Far from going away, Helen’s emotional challenges if anything get worse and the film is all the better for that.

I haven’t read Macdonald’s memoir but the film version seems to have been shorn of the literary richness that won the book prizes. The pace is a tad slow too. But, nevertheless, I liked it. 

Foy and Lowthorpe join forces to ensure that Helen is not glamorised for the big screen and never pretend that she’s anything other than a complicated character. 

The end result has a pleasing honesty, an eye-catching supporting turn from Sam Spruell as Helen’s hawking mentor and an unexpectedly lovely ending.