You’ve got to love cinema. It has such emotional room for approaching the same subjects from completely opposite and yet somehow complementary positions. Take this considered adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s bestselling grief memoir, arriving weeks after another considered adaptation of the bestselling grief novel Hamnet. Both movies track the agonies of a formidable female protagonist — in this case Macdonald, who is played by a never better Claire Foy from The Crown. Both movies place their character’s grief over the loss of a male relative in the context of nature. In both the women bond with birds of prey, and can find peace only through a greater understanding of their place within a wider tapestry. And yet, despite this, these two films could not be further apart on the dramatic spectrum, nor could their tonal ambitions be more disparate.
If Hamnet was the big weepy sob, then H Is for Hawk, in the best way, is the stiff upper lip. It announces the death of Macdonald’s beloved dad, Alisdair (a warm Brendan Gleeson), in an early scene via hospital phone call in 2007. Macdonald, at the time a research fellow at Cambridge in the department of history and philosophy of science, receives the news with shock but quickly composes herself and opts for a posh restaurant meal with her Aussie buddy Christina (Denise Gough), explaining: “The table’s booked and we’re late!” There are, in other words, no Max Richter strings swelling on the soundtrack, no wailing and no communal epiphanies.
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Instead Macdonald impulsively adopts an intimidating goshawk (there’s a family history of casual falconry). The bird, she learns from the expert Stuart (Sam Spruell), is “the wildest and maddest of raptors” and is thus a perfect metaphor for the fierce and unruly process of grief. So the film is a parallel double-drama that charts Macdonald’s growing yet always tentative bond with the goshawk, named Mabel, while simultaneously exploring the young academic’s gradual emotional disintegration and her alienation from a superficial academic milieu. Cambridge University life, as depicted by the director Philippa Lowthorpe (Misbehaviour) and the screenwriter Emma Donoghue (Room), receives a special hammering, with pusillanimous beta-male students and pompous visiting professors the anathema of Macdonald’s search for true connection with the natural world.
Elsewhere Donoghue’s judicious adaptation axes a lot of unnecessary weight from the book, including all the ponderous guff about the writer TH White. Instead she adds some smart new supporting scenes, such as Macdonald’s piquant university rant about the toxicity of Thomas Carlyle’s “great man” theory of history, even as she falls to pieces over the one genuinely great man in her life.
Foy is exceptional throughout in a project that frequently requires her to share the frame with a beady-eyed, sharp-clawed killer and, crucially, to convey a combination of awestruck admiration and stultifying terror. One of the most compelling and oddly moving scenes features Macdonald, raptor on wrist, slowly and carefully pacing around her Cambridge flat, and introducing a still skittish Mabel to her kettle and her toaster while saying evenly, “This is my kitchen, and these are some of my treasures.”
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One of Macdonald’s greatest epiphanies is delivered drily and without much fanfare, when she simply acknowledges that her father “was the only person in the world who truly understood me. And now that he’s gone I miss him terribly.” Again, no strings. No Richter. No wailing.
Ultimately this protagonist looks to nature and to Mabel in an admirable attempt to reconcile the ubiquity of death, the brevity of life and the urgent, though possibly pointless, search for meaning.
★★★★☆
12A, 115min
In cinemas from Jan 23
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