H is for Hawk: Adaptation of Grief Memoir Lovely If Earthbound

By Kim Hughes

Rating: A-

The new drama H is for Hawk arrives with a sterling pedigree.

Based on the bestselling 2014 memoir by British academic and author Helen Macdonald, the screenplay was co-written by the film’s BAFTA-winning director Philippa Lowthorpe alongside acclaimed novelist Emma Donoghue (Room).

It stars the indomitable Brendan Gleeson, The Crown’s Claire Foy, and Lindsay Duncan, and was co-produced by Brad Pitt whose behind-the-scenes thumbprint with Plan B Productions (see Hedda, The Voice of Hind Rajab, Nickel Boys et al) is damn near unimpeachable.

Alas, credentials beget expectations. And while H is for Hawk is a genuinely lovely film — often visually beguiling, beautifully acted, and tender-hearted — it lacks dramatic punch, which may be the inevitable byproduct of a cinematic interpretation of a deeply introspective book that rooted the reader deep in the author’s psyche.

Still, there’s plenty to recommend it. The film opens in Cambridge in 2007 where Helen (Foy) is teaching and pondering a prestigious post-doc position in Germany. One night, as Helen and her friend Christina (Denise Gough) are preparing to go out for dinner, Helen receives the awful news that her beloved Dad (Gleeson), an acclaimed and audacious photographer, has died suddenly of a heart attack.

Helen is shattered. Flashbacks throughout the film reveal that Dad was a towering figure in Helen’s life, the one person who truly understood his scholarly, square-peg child and who nurtured in Helen a love of the natural world and, especially, falconry.

And so, to assuage her crushing grief and maintain a link with her departed father in this realm, Helen decides to obtain and train a goshawk. The bird is a stealthy, stone-cold predator; even the birding-expert friend of Helen’s father cautions her against it.

Indeed, when Helen meets a shady goshawk seller on a pier in what Christina describes as a scene resembling a drug deal, the seller warns, “You know the trick with a gos? Murder. Calm’s ‘em right down. Get her our hunting as quickly as you can and let her kill a lot.”

Helen brings the goshawk home and begins the gradual process of training her. One of the film’s most riveting scenes is set the first morning in Helen’s flat as she wrangles the tethered hawk, eventually named Mabel, as it desperately tries to fly away.

Helen’s constrained calm is powerfully juxtaposed against the hawk’s primal flapping. It’s beautifully lit and breathtaking. (Foy worked extensively with the film’s two starring hawks before filming began).

Yet as Helen’s emotional bond with Mabel deepens and their exploits lead them on city walks full of gawkers and on hunting expeditions in the countryside— the film was shot on location in Cambridge and in Wales — Helen’s grief-streaked regular life systemically falls apart.

Her flat morphs into a guano-covered pigsty, her personal appearance declines, classes get forgotten, beds are swapped for cardboard boxes on the floor, and tenure tracking becomes tenuous. Interventions by Mom (Duncan), brother James (Josh Dylan), and Christina only underscore how unmoored Helen has become. Nothing seems to help, until something kind of does. Your guess is undoubtedly correct.

Ironically, Foy’s success in conjuring Helen’s emotional detachment keeps the viewer at bay even as we sympathize with her sadness and marvel at her ability to manage a creature whose bloodlust for rabbit and grouse contrasts with Helen’s desire to shrink inside herself.

The film’s naturalistic dialogue and palpable respect for wildlife — it opens with lingering shots of Mabel’s gorgeous plumage and recognizes a mouse with a cameo by name in the credits — adds plenty to the go-see column.

But it’s hard to feel invested in the film’s central character: Helen, not the hawk, whose feral eyes and ferocious flights are magnificent to behold.

H is for Hawk. Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe. Written by Philippa Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue. Starring Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, Lindsay Duncan, Josh Dylan and Denise Gough. In theatres January 23.