H is for Hawk: Claire Foy brings a measured intensity to this uneven grief drama

Helen Macdonald’s 2014 book H Is for Hawk overcame its pedestrian title to become a bestseller of a fairly traditional stripe: the better-living-through-animal-care memoir, a subgenre that spans works as literary as Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water (1960) and as pop-disposable as John Grogan’s Marley & Me (2005). Macdonald’s book veers closer to the literary end, detailing the Cambridge academic’s recovery from the death of their beloved father through an impulsive and wild-hearted decision to adopt and train a goshawk – it’s elegantly written and unsentimentally affecting, rife with fascinatingly nubbly, arcane detail on the specifics of raptor rearing. Still, it was ripe for cinematic adaptation, and thus vulnerable to some coarsening of its emotional nuances and intellectual fixations.

Happily, Philippa Lowthorpe’s handsome, stouthearted film mostly treats its source material with the care and respect you would give to, well, any sharp-beaked bird of prey – preserving its balance of stoicism and unruly feeling even as it streamlines the book’s narrative focus and somewhat romanticises its naturalist’s eye. There’s an English Heritage gloss to its celebration of landscape and non-human life that wasn’t quite Macdonald’s style: Lowthorpe, who made her feature directing debut with a picture-perfect period adaptation of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (2016), presents the Great British outdoors as a kind of lung-filling adventure ground, ravishingly painted in tweedy autumnal tones.

No surprise that a number of the book’s more indoorsy interests, including a parallel biographical investigation of fellow author and hawk-trainer T.H. White, have been scrapped in the script by the novelist Emma Donoghue, who has previously written the screen adaptations of her own books Room (2015) and The Wonder (2022). The version of the film reviewed, furthermore, is 15 minutes shorter than the one that premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September, though still a satisfyingly robust 115 minutes. The book’s lateral, interior digressions would be difficult to integrate into a propulsive cinematic structure, though their excision does simplify its complex, eloquent articulation of grief’s curious mental circuitry its evocation of how the bereaved mind darts and skips between ideas and obsessions.

Here, Macdonald’s healing process is largely centred on their majestically tawny, chippy avian companion given the unsuitably dowdy name of Mabel and played by a feathered ensemble who collectively form a charismatic scene partner to Claire Foy’s pleasingly dry and intense protagonist. Mabel isn’t an entirely out-of-the-blue acquisition: flashbacks show how the author’s love of birding was instilled in them from childhood by their photojournalist father Alisdair, played by Brendan Gleeson with enough sturdy vitality that we too mourn his absence from the film’s present-tense proceedings.

The goshawk is a distraction and an outlet for feelings of anguish and unrest that Macdonald can’t express in human company, but also a kind of spiritual proxy for the departed: the intuitive, nature based connection they had with their father is something akin to what they have with the bird. This is expressed with less dewy metaphor-speak than you might fear or expect. Certainly, their scenes together, whether at home or in the wild, are the film’s most moving, as their relationship evolves from flapping, frightening cross-species cross-purposes to wary understanding to serene trust.

Meanwhile, the literal nature of the beast keeps more saccharine closure at bay: you can only get so cuddly with a raptor, after all. Charlotte Bruus Christensen’s warm, sparingly lit, hessian-textured cinematography heightens the intimacy of these bonding passages, while the film’s fresh-air spectacle is largely steered by Mark Payne-Gill, an Emmy-winning wildlife director of photography known for his work on BBC nature documentaries. His soaring shots of Mabel in flight are duly stunning, even as they take us far outside Macdonald’s headspace.

The film’s more interpersonal drama is its weak spot. Neither Denise Gough nor Lindsay Duncan is given much to do as Macdonald’s best friend and mother, respectively, and when the action drifts toward anything more dialogue-propelled, the audience is likely to share our recessive protagonist’s urge to escape to the country. One rather poignant scene, in which Macdonald ill-advisedly brings Mabel to a university gathering, only to wind up isolated and defensive, rather pointedly underlines where the story’s strengths lie. But Foy’s fine performance, doughty and purposeful, with a stiff upper lip that barely masks a well of less reserved anger, gives H Is for Hawk about all the humanity it needs.

► H is for Hawk is in UK cinemas 23 January.