A hawk, one assumes, cannot experience self-pity. Where would it sit in their existence, anyway, in that space between the fleeing rabbit and its shredded, pink flesh? In Philippa Lowthorpe’s H Is for Hawk, based on a 2014 memoir by naturalist Helen Macdonald, a friend describes the predatory goshawk as a “perfectly evolved psychopath”.
It’s that escape from sentiment, from the drowning force of grief, that leads Helen (Claire Foy) to become trapped in a spiralling dependency on a goshawk named Mabel. A bird of prey, after all, will never tilt their head and offer their sympathies. And, in Lowthorpe’s tender handling of the material, working from a script written by Room author Emma Donoghue, what comes across first as an eccentric coping mechanism shifts into something less easily defined, more slippery.
Helen’s relationship with Mabel can be seen, through one lens, as a healing confrontation with the unfettered cycles of nature, with the goshawk as its own memento mori. But it also, at times, feels like an abstract form of self-harm, one that leaves her with literal bloodied claw marks as her prize (she/her pronouns are used in the film, though Macdonald goes by they/them).
In short, H Is for Hawk is a film about what happens when the cycle of grief won’t even start. Helen reacts to news of the death of her beloved photojournalist father, Alisdair (Brendan Gleeson, so mischievous and luminous that even I was struck by the pain of his absence), by insisting she upholds her dinner reservations with friend Christina (Denise Gough, also wonderful). She then sits there, staring into her curry like it’s the abyss itself, while a nervous waiter slides a conciliatory dessert under her nose.
Helen’s stasis is affecting because it’s allowed to be prickly and difficult. Her time as a Cambridge research fellow is coming to its natural end, with her accommodation going with it, and while there’s a potential postdoctorate to be pursued in Germany, life is instantly tossed to the side when she acquires Mabel out of the back of a car boot. She takes the bird home and then seals herself away, watching it perched in the middle of the living room at the centre of a ritualistic circle of newspapers.
She doesn’t answer the door when it knocks. She doesn’t pack. She doesn’t write her father’s eulogy. He had a single-mindedness to him, too – the way he’d look through a viewfinder and filter out all the rest of the world. But this is something more, Helen’s mother (Lindsay Duncan) frets.
Foy’s always had a way with hard edges, with her Queen’s resilience on The Crown or when berating astronauts in First Man (2018), and here she’s able to depict loss as an emptying. You can see the missing piece of her, the gap that was once filled with a father’s love. But, with Mabel, you can also see how she becomes a child (and specifically a daughter) again, in a way that feels itchy and feverish.
Lowthorpe makes an unexpectedly adept scene partner out of the goshawk pair playing Mabel, always taking advantage of the natural fury that seems to rest on the bird’s brow. And when she flies, Charlotte Bruus Christensen’s camera soars with it, keeping close to all that lethal beauty. Foy trained extensively in falconry so that there’s no need for trickery in these scenes. Helen’s relief is the actor’s, too. H Is for Hawk concerns itself less with the healing of wounds, but rather with the prying open of them. Can we look so deep into the pulp that the fear of it eventually washes away?
Dir: Philippa Lowthorpe. Starring: Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, Denise Gough, Sam Spruell, Lindsay Duncan. Cert 12A, 115 minutes.
‘H Is for Hawk’ is in cinemas from 23 January
