Helen Macdonald<\/a>\u2019s bestselling nature memoir from 2014 \u2013 addresses these questions, but can\u2019t quite deliver the Hollywood redemption narrative that it appears to offer: the story of a woman in the depths of melancholy who is helped through the darkness and, we have to assume, out the other side, by her goshawk, whimsically named Mabel. (Macdonald used she\/her pronouns at the time of publication and came out as non-binary in 2022.)<\/p>\nAudiences might, by the closing credits, think they still don\u2019t quite know what happens to Helen and Mabel in the end, or perhaps at any time, but then again real life can feel messy and unfinished in just this way.<\/p>\n
Claire Foy plays Macdonald in 2007, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge teaching the history and philosophy of science. She adores and hero-worships her dad, the award-winning photographer Alisdair Macdonald, played here by Brendan Gleeson, who inculcated in her a love of nature, and when he dies she is utterly distraught.<\/p>\n
So Helen conceives a mysterious need to buy a goshawk from a dealer. She gets her expert mate Stuart (Sam Spruell) to help her train it and becomes a superbly eccentric Cambridge don for keeping Mabel on her wrist in college but then deeply worries her mum (Lindsay Duncan) by not leaving the house: Helen and Mabel descending into squalor together.<\/p>\n
Claire Foy is clearly doing this for real: she has obviously learned to handle a goshawk \u2013 and her scenes have a tremendous authenticity. When she looks nervous with Mabel, she is genuinely nervous. When she is thrilled to get Mabel to do something, she is genuinely thrilled. With this bird, there can be no \u201cacting\u201d. The best moment comes when Helen has Mabel in the car, and it looks like Clarice Starling has taken Dr Lecter for a drive.<\/p>\n
So has the relationship between Helen and Mabel deepened by the end? Is there, in fact, a relationship? Perhaps this could be scheduled in a season of films about people getting up close and personal with predatory animals, along with Loach\u2019s Kes, Hitchcock\u2019s The Birds and Herzog\u2019s Grizzly Man. Mabel\u2019s ice-cold gaze is very scary.<\/p>\n
H is for Hawk screened at the London film festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Can training a goshawk cure grief? Or treat it, in some way? Will keeping it indoors \u2013 hooded…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-197123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}