H Is for Hawk Review: Birds of a Feather

You don’t have to wait long to get to a hawk – the opening credits kick off with marvelous close-ups on feathers and taut muscles – but it takes a while to meet Mabel, the goshawk at the center of Helen Macdonald’s 2014 memoir, adapted here by director Philippa Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue (Room). Claire Foy, whom Lowthorpe previously directed on Foy’s Emmy-winning second season of The Crown, plays Macdonald, a Cambridge academic sunk with grief by the sudden death of her father (Brendan Gleeson), a celebrated photojournalist. In economical flashback, father and daughter’s special bond is conveyed: They share a maverick streak, a lightly aslant sense of humor, a passion for the natural world. A touching moment in the car catches the pair in a mirroring pose, staring up and out the windshield, heads titled in admiration at a hawk in flight.

And a hawk is where Helen pours her grief, or rather distracts from it. An experienced falconer, she levels way, way up when she acquires a goshawk – what her falconer friend Stuart (A Knight of the Seven Kingdom‘s Sam Spruell) calls “a perfectly evolved psychopath.” (Refusing to be rerouted to a creature less challenging than a goshawk, Helen tartly responds, “I don’t want a lady bird.”) The film tracks the laborious training process of how anxious, heartbroken Helen forges a bond with Mabel, and it’s fascinating stuff. The filmmakers clearly share memoirist Macdonald’s profound respect for these elegant predators, and there’s a solemnity to how the film presents Mabel on the hunt, even as the chase scenes also race the heart – something Helen tries to articulate to her students, about the holiness in bearing witness to Mabel’s essential nature. Tries, and mostly fails, because Helen is really not dealing well, which is not always readily apparent. In its portrait of someone both grief-stricken and obsessive, H Is for Hawk cannily mimics Helen’s own misdirection: The training of Mabel is so engrossing, you can forget for some minutes that Helen is barely keeping it together, and it’s what keeps her friends and family mostly at bay, too, until the extent of her not-keeping-it-together is undeniable. Foy handles the tricky characterization – Helen’s prickliness and anxiety, her steady dimming – movingly.

Sincere, straightforward, compactly scoped, a recognizable strain of rumply/British/poignant: There’s something gently out-of-fashion about H Is for Hawk. On the subject of parental loss, a fairly universal experience, H Is for Hawk’s insights read familiar but never epiphanic. The goshawk is the revelation. For obvious reasons, she sits out the film’s climactic, church-set eulogy – well-written and performed, but it feels like the climax to a different movie. Without Mabel, H Is for Hawk rather loses the plot.

This article appears in January 23 • 2026.