H Is for Hawk begins in the shadow of profound loss, tracing one woman’s attempt to impose order on grief through an extreme and isolating devotion to ritual.
Adapted from Helen Macdonald’s memoir and directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, the film is less about recovery than about inhabiting grief, sitting with it, testing its edge, and sometimes letting it run wild.
Set in 2007, the story follows Helen Macdonald (Claire Foy), a Cambridge academic specialising in the history of science, whose world collapses after the sudden death of her father, Alisdair (Brendan Gleeson). Their bond was rooted in a shared love of the natural, so when he dies, Helen’s grief is immediate and total. Rather than turning outward for comfort, she retreats into a strange and demanding project. She decides to buying and train a goshawk, she names Mabel.
What follows is not a heartwarming tale of healing through nature, but something far more unsettling and honest. Bird-taming here is depicted as obsessive, isolating and frequently cruel, not just to prey animals, but to the human attempting to disappear into the discipline. Helen keeps Mabel hooded indoors, neglects her own wellbeing, and withdraws from friends and family, alarming her mother (a quietly excellent Lindsay Duncan). The bird becomes both companion and mirror: fierce, untouchable, and utterly uninterested in human consolation.
Claire Foy’s performance is the film’s greatest strength. Her work with the hawk feels unmistakably real—there’s no sense of theatrical safety in these scenes. When she’s tense, you feel the danger; when she succeeds, the relief is electric. There’s a thrilling authenticity to her physical presence, particularly in moments when control seems precarious. One standout scene involving Mabel in the car is both darkly funny and genuinely unnerving, underlining how alien this relationship really is.
Lowthorpe wisely avoids turning Mabel into a metaphor with feathers. The film never pretends this bond is nurturing in a conventional sense, and it doesn’t offer packaged answers about whether Helen is helped or harmed by her fixation. By the end, the relationship has shifted, but whether it’s grown, softened, or simply exhausted itself is left unresolved.
That ambiguity may frustrate some viewers, but it feels true to the experience of grief, which rarely moves in straight lines. H Is for Hawk is a very precise, unsettling and quietly devastating film. Those who know the origninal text, are sure to be satisfied with this unassuming adaptation.
