Few stiff upper lips — not even Queen Elizabeth’s — have ever been stiffer than the one Claire Foy sports throughout the better part of Philippa Lowthorpe’s “H Is for Hawk,” which is adapted from Helen MacDonald’s deservedly ubiquitous 2014 grief memoir of the same name. Foy naturally plays a version of the author (her character uses she/her pronouns, while MacDonald identifies as non-binary), a level-headed Cambridge academic who develops an all-consuming addiction to falconry rather than face the hurt of her photojournalist father’s sudden death.
But where the book had the benefit of MacDonald’s beautiful and searching interior monologue, the movie chooses to articulate her pain — as well as her refusal to process it — from the outside in. That decision leaves us to read chapters’ worth of nuanced hurt into the stony defiance of Foy’s scowl, just as Helen has to search for meaning in the expressionless face of the goshawk she adopts as the world’s least comforting comfort animal.
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On some level, that double-sided inaccessibility is crucial to a tale of two unfeeling creatures whose survival depends on their mutual ability to share “an honest encounter with death,” but honesty isn’t the problem with this adaptation. Barring a few of the very screenplay-like scenarios that Lowthorpe and co-writer Emma Donoghue (of “Room” fame) contrive during the film’s third act, “H Is for Hawk” is too rooted in the truth of its source material — and too grounded by the sheer reality of watching Foy react to the whims of her feathered co-star — to suffer from a lack of believability. The trouble here has less to do with verisimilitude than engagement; this story about the power and pratfalls of emotional projection simply doesn’t inspire enough feeling for us to see much of anything on either of its two blank screens.
Blank or not, Helen is hardly a passive character. She takes after her dad (Brendan Gleeson, lived-in and rascally throughout the staccato flashbacks that comprise his part), a photojournalist who prowled the world like a curious hunter and never left home without his camera — the last pictures he ever took were snapped as he collapsed to the ground from a heart attack. His work taught him to look for the angle in everything, even death, and so moping is out of the question when Helen learns about her father’s passing. Indeed, Helen’s first reaction is to go out to dinner with her best friend, Christina (“Andor” breakout Denise Gough, much nicer here), where their waiter brings her a “sorry your dad died” desert platter (the funniest moment of a movie that never runs the risk of being too bleak).
It soon becomes clear that Helen, whose love for her father is painted in strokes so broad that it never feels like more than a vague idea, is clinically incapable of accepting that he’s gone. “When you are broken, you run,” MacDonald writes. “But you don’t always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards.” Helen runs towards falconry at full speed. Indeed, her dad is hardly in the ground before she buys a goshawk from some guy she found on the internet — a goshawk that becomes her entire personality the moment she brings it home. She names it Mabel.
Fun fact: Birds of prey are so piloted by eyesight that a thing essentially doesn’t exist to them if they can’t see it in their field of vision — they’re the perfect pet for someone living in extreme denial. Except Mabel isn’t a pet so much as she is an unruly houseguest who shits on the floor, freaks out if you look her directly in the eye, and subsists on a diet of raw meat that she refuses to eat until she’s good and ready. She is, as one person describes her species, a “perfectly evolved psychopath,” but that predatory nature is more of a feature than a bug so far as Helen is concerned, as the bird’s absolute indifference towards death is the very thing our heroine is hoping to internalize for herself.
The previously blah “H Is for Hawk” comes alive during the frequent scenes of Helen training Mabel to trust her, to come back to her when she calls, and eventually to hunt with her. The bond doesn’t form overnight. At first, Foy plays Helen like someone who has an apache gunship-like killing machine strapped to her arm, and though the actress underwent extensive training for the role, you get the sense that it probably wasn’t a struggle for her to get into character during these scenes. Like Tom Cruise driving a motorcycle off a cliff or Werner Herzog pulling a steamship over a hill (not personally, but you know what I mean), there’s a visceral thrill to the undeniable fact of what Foy is doing, and Lowthorpe’s watchful but uncomplicated direction smartly emphasizes the lack of fakery whenever it can.
That verisimilitude makes Helen’s denial so real that it makes her grief seem more real as well, even if only in her refusal to acknowledge it. She begins to become increasingly manic about Mabel at the same rate as she becomes increasingly indifferent toward everything else — her appearance, the class she teaches, and her loved ones (including Lindsay Duncan as her mother). Helen becomes more feral as Mabel becomes easier to control, and the same woman who dropped everything to help a massive spider back outside at the start of the movie is soon crawling alongside her bird as it tears rabbits in half with its beak.
“H Is for Hawk” strains to articulate the process by which Helen bottoms out (in the film’s clumsiest scene, she gives a class talk that ends with her screaming “We’re all going to die!” to a bunch of startled undergrads), and only fares a little better in giving shape to her eventual recognition of the fact that she and Mabel have a fundamentally different relationship with death — that humanity is as impossible for her to escape as it is for the goshawk to achieve. Yes, there will forever be a hole in her heart, but that’s only because she and her father could bond on a deeper level than playing catch with some paper balls (the closest that Mabel gets to displaying anything like affection).
In her book, MacDonald writes that “In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.” In the overlong film that Lowthorpe has made from it (which drags its ending out for all eternity in order to make up for lost time and indulge in its newfound emotion), that hard-won education is expressed with all the nuance of “My Octopus Teacher.”
When Helen finally allows herself to process her father’s loss, and thereby invites us to do so alongside her, it doesn’t feel as if she’s found her way back to something she was running away from so much as it feels like she was caught like a fugitive from her own grief and dragged back to face the world’s judgment against her will. For our part, we’re left feeling more like her goshawk: Heads cocked, stares blank, stomachs hungry for raw meat.
Grade: C+
“H Is for Hawk” premiered at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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