H is for half-awake. Philippa Lowthorpe’s H Is for Hawk adapts Helen Macdonald’s bestselling memoir with sensitivity, patience and an exasperating stillness.
Following on from last year’s The Thing with Feathers, the second unlikely screen adaptation of an avian-themed study of grief features plenty of Irish talent: Emma Donoghue, the novelist, adapted Macdonald’s bestseller, while Brendan Gleeson and Denise Gough play pivotal roles.
The story is simple if eccentric: after the sudden death of her beloved father, Helen (Claire Foy), a Cambridge academic with a knack for emotional deflection, decides to raise a goshawk.
A goshawk! A supportive fellow bird fancier (Sam Spruell) uses the same awed tone deployed for Catalina Wine Mixer in Step Brothers or Rachmaninoff in the musical biopic Shine.
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What follows is a study of grief stifled, displaced and occasionally stuffed in a woman-sized cardboard box. Joyful flashback sequences convey Helen’s hero-worship of her larger-than-life photojournalist dad, Alisdair Macdonald (Gleeson). The most compelling scenes intersect with such animal-husbandry classics as The Call of the Wild or The Black Stallion.
Even when she is consumed by bird training and her house is cluttered with rancid raptor snacks, Helen insists she is coping. “Dad would hate moping,” she says, brushing aside concern from her worried mum (Lindsay Duncan) and alarmed best friend (Gough).
Mabel, as Helen names the goshawk, is not a pet, she insists, but a hunting partner.
Lowthorpe, writing with Donoghue, excels at capturing the darkly comic textures of mourning: a waiter responding to news of a death with a free brownie, or siblings struggling to suppress laughter over tastelessly “themed” coffins at the funeral parlour. Foy is excellent at embodying stiff-upper-lip repression, flicking away tears in precise, disciplined movements.
Charlotte Bruus Christensen’s cinematography enlivens forests, fields and skies with reverence for nature, while Mabel herself – played by various birds – is a mesmerising, unpredictable presence. As Helen’s fixation deepens, her life is consumed by a bond that is both lifeline and trap.
The problem here is not insight but narrative stagnation. Too often H Is for Hawk confuses slowness with contemplation, repeating emotional beats and trumpeting parallels between Helen and Mabel. The goshawk reminds us how enthusiastically humans project themselves on to the animal kingdom. The film reminds us how limiting these analogies can be.
In cinemas from Friday, January 23rd
