‘H is for Hawk’ Review
What people do with their grief can speak volumes about their relationship with the deceased. A massive loss can cause people to behave irrationally or to rewire their brains in ways that even those closest to them can’t fully comprehend. Grief acts in strange ways, and in the case of writer Helen Macdonald, it led them to train a Eurasian goshawk for a year after the loss of their father. Translated into a best-selling memoir, H is for Hawk is inherently ripe material for adaptation to a medium that has often looked for fresh ways to portray familiar emotions. Which is why Philippa Lowthorpe’s latest film—an adaptation of Macdonald’s memoir—feels fully realized from the outset. However, despite its incredible foundation, H is for Hawk wallows in its conceit for too long, immersing audiences in a staggering loss at the cost of its storytelling.
There’s a case to be made that H is for Hawk loses something in the adaptation to the screen. Casting Claire Foy, who has proven herself capable of incredibly nuanced interiority, as Helen immediately lays bare the film’s emotions as she isolates herself from everyone in her life following the death of her father, Alisdair (Brendan Gleeson). Teaching at a college in Cambridge, she has an opportunity to further her academic career in Berlin but finds herself attracted to the idea of purchasing and raising a hawk—a fascination that evidently stems from her late father’s shared appreciation for nature and ornithology. However, her attention to her new feathered friend, Mabel, becomes worrisome to those around Helen, including her mother (Lindsay Duncan) and her best friend, Christina (Denise Gough).
Adapted to the screen by Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue, there is no doubt throughout the film that Helen is deeply suffering from the loss of her father. Everything surrounding Helen feels suffocating and is intended to capture a verisimilitude that immerses its viewer in a state of being rather than in reckoning with those emotions. We see the characters who love Helen trying to break through that fog to no avail. Shot by Charlotte Bruus Christensen, there’s an intimacy and a darkness that engulf Helen. A cinematographer whose work with filmmakers like Thomas Vinterberg and on films like A Quiet Place and The Girl on the Train has always evoked a sense of dread, Christensen captures Helen’s heartache through intrusive close-ups that hold her suffering firmly in frame.
However, what’s lost in the desire to completely submerge the audience in grief is a connection fundamental to tethering oneself to a character’s feelings for the film’s almost 2-hour runtime. Foy invites people into her character’s pain, but the struggle isn’t with feeling for her; it’s feeling for her for far too long, even as the film rarely seems to move forward. It’s a languidly paced movie that clearly conveys the stagnation and regression that grief can cause, but only briefly flickers at the possibility of moving forward from loss. It’s clearly something the film recognizes as a problem, because it uses flashbacks to moments between Helen and her father to reconcile the gap between character depth and emotional depth.
Helen’s goshawk shares the spotlight in H is for Hawk, lending an air of realism to Foy’s performance. As Helen learns to raise Mabel, her emotions often fluctuate between frustration, hopefulness, and excitement over Mabel's progress. The two gradually feel like they’ve formed a genuine bond by the end of the film, but it’s that commitment from both Helen and Foy to the craft that helps sell a relationship that can feel like a prisoner and its warden. Scenes of Mabel attempting to fly away while chained inside Helen’s home may imitate the stranglehold that grief has over Helen, but it’s also the early stages of learning to trust someone, and the way that relationship develops in the wake of losing a relationship is where H is for Hawk finds something meaningful to pursue.
The primary problem with H is for Hawk is that it is thematically potent but dramatically inert. There’s an uneasy feeling that nothing will ever be the same again for Helen, but it’s not a feeling that ever seems to be contended with narratively until closer to the end. It’s a film of bookends—neither of which is strong enough to support the lengthy wallowing in the middle. The resulting film is atmospheric and resonant, but H is for Hawk ultimately stays low to the ground once it takes off, struggling to reckon with the feelings it evokes.
