Few stiff higher lips — not even Queen Elizabeth’s — have ever been stiffer than the one Claire Foy sports activities all through the higher a part of Philippa Lowthorpe’s “H Is for Hawk,” which is customized from Helen MacDonald’s deservedly ubiquitous 2014 grief memoir of the identical title. Foy naturally performs a model of the writer (her character makes use of she/her pronouns, whereas MacDonald identifies as non-binary), a level-headed Cambridge educational who develops an all-consuming habit to falconry quite than face the damage of her photojournalist father’s sudden dying.
However the place the e book had the good thing about MacDonald’s stunning and looking inside monologue, the film chooses to articulate her ache — in addition to her refusal to course of it — from the skin in. That call leaves us to learn chapters’ price of nuanced damage into the stony defiance of Foy’s scowl, simply as Helen has to seek for which means within the expressionless face of the goshawk she adopts because the world’s least comforting consolation animal.
On some degree, that double-sided inaccessibility is essential to a story of two unfeeling creatures whose survival is determined by their mutual skill to share “an sincere encounter with dying,” however honesty isn’t the issue with this adaptation. Barring just a few of the very screenplay-like situations that Lowthorpe and co-writer Emma Donoghue (of “Room” fame) contrive throughout the movie’s third act, “H Is for Hawk” is simply too rooted within the fact of its supply materials — and too grounded by the sheer actuality of watching Foy react to the whims of her feathered co-star — to undergo from a scarcity of believability. The difficulty right here has much less to do with verisimilitude than engagement; this story in regards to the energy and pratfalls of emotional projection merely doesn’t encourage sufficient feeling for us to see a lot of something on both of its two clean screens.
Clean or not, Helen is hardly a passive character. She takes after her dad (Brendan Gleeson, lived-in and rascally all through the staccato flashbacks that comprise his half), a photojournalist who prowled the world like a curious hunter and by no means left residence with out his digicam — the final footage he ever took have been snapped as he collapsed to the bottom from a coronary heart assault. His work taught him to search for the angle in the whole lot, even dying, and so moping is out of the query when Helen learns about her father’s passing. Certainly, Helen’s first response is to exit to dinner together with her finest pal, Christina (“Andor” breakout Denise Gough, a lot nicer right here), the place their waiter brings her a “sorry your dad died” desert platter (the funniest second of a film that by no means runs the danger of being too bleak).
It quickly turns into clear that Helen, whose love for her father is painted in strokes so broad that it by no means looks like greater than a imprecise thought, is clinically incapable of accepting that he’s gone. “If you find yourself damaged, you run,” MacDonald writes. “However you don’t all the time run away. Generally, helplessly, you run in the direction of.” Helen runs in the direction of falconry at full velocity. Certainly, her dad is hardly within the floor earlier than she buys a goshawk from some man she discovered on the web — a goshawk that turns into her complete persona the second she brings it residence. She names it Mabel.
Enjoyable truth: Birds of prey are so piloted by eyesight {that a} factor primarily doesn’t exist to them if they’ll’t see it of their visual view — they’re the proper pet for somebody residing in excessive denial. Besides Mabel isn’t a pet a lot as she is an unruly houseguest who shits on the ground, freaks out for those who look her immediately within the eye, and subsists on a food plan of uncooked meat that she refuses to eat till she’s good and prepared. She is, as one individual describes her species, a “completely developed psychopath,” however that predatory nature is extra of a characteristic than a bug as far as Helen is worried, because the chicken’s absolute indifference in the direction of dying is the very factor our heroine is hoping to internalize for herself.
The beforehand blah “H Is for Hawk” comes alive throughout the frequent scenes of Helen coaching Mabel to belief her, to come back again to her when she calls, and ultimately to hunt together with her. The bond doesn’t kind in a single day. At first, Foy performs Helen like somebody who has an apache gunship-like killing machine strapped to her arm, and although the actress underwent intensive coaching for the function, you get the sense that it in all probability wasn’t a wrestle for her to get into character throughout these scenes. Like Tom Cruise driving a motorbike off a cliff or Werner Herzog pulling a steamship over a hill (not personally, however you realize what I imply), there’s a visceral thrill to the indisputable fact of what Foy is doing, and Lowthorpe’s watchful however uncomplicated route well emphasizes the shortage of fakery at any time when it may.
That verisimilitude makes Helen’s denial so actual that it makes her grief appear extra actual as effectively, even when solely in her refusal to acknowledge it. She begins to change into more and more manic about Mabel on the similar price as she turns into more and more detached towards the whole lot else — her look, the category she teaches, and her family members (together with Lindsay Duncan as her mom). Helen turns into extra feral as Mabel turns into simpler to manage, and the identical lady who dropped the whole lot to assist an enormous spider again outdoors at first of the film is quickly crawling alongside her chicken because it tears rabbits in half with its beak.
“H Is for Hawk” strains to articulate the method by which Helen bottoms out (within the movie’s clumsiest scene, she provides a category speak that ends together with her screaming “We’re all going to die!” to a bunch of startled undergrads), and solely fares just a little higher in giving form to her eventual recognition of the truth that she and Mabel have a essentially totally different relationship with dying — that humanity is as not possible for her to flee as it’s for the goshawk to attain. Sure, there’ll endlessly be a gap in her coronary heart, however that’s solely as a result of she and her father might bond on a deeper degree than taking part in catch with some paper balls (the closest that Mabel will get to displaying something like affection).
In her e book, MacDonald writes that “In my time with Mabel I’ve realized how you are feeling extra human after you have recognized, even in your creativeness, what it’s wish to be not.” Within the overlong movie that Lowthorpe has made out of it (which drags its ending out for all eternity with a view to make up for misplaced time and take pleasure in its newfound emotion), that hard-won schooling is expressed with all of the nuance of “My Octopus Instructor.”
When Helen lastly permits herself to course of her father’s loss, and thereby invitations us to take action alongside her, it doesn’t really feel as if she’s discovered her method again to one thing she was working away from a lot because it looks like she was caught like a fugitive from her personal grief and dragged again to face the world’s judgment in opposition to her will. For our half, we’re left feeling extra like her goshawk: Heads cocked, stares clean, stomachs hungry for uncooked meat.
Grade: C+
“H Is for Hawk” premiered on the 2025 Telluride Movie Competition. It’s at the moment looking for U.S. distribution.
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