Monthly Archives: January 2026

  • H is for Hawk

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Philippa Lowthorpe (2025)

    There are parts of Helen Macdonald’s memoir H is for Hawk, first published in 2014, that lend themselves quite naturally to dramatic adaptation.  For example, how Macdonald learns of her much-loved father’s sudden death.  In her rooms in Cambridge, where she’s on a junior research fellowship, Helen’s about to go out to eat with her friend Christina, an Australian academic, when the phone rings.  It’s Helen’s mother, who breaks the shocking news.  Her daughter struggles to take it in; once she’s done so, she tells Christina, who’s in the room with her, that they should go to the restaurant.  The table’s booked, and they still need to eat, though when they get to the restaurant, Helen doesn’t.  Christina explains the situation to a concerned waiter who takes away Helen’s untouched main course.  He returns with another plate of food – ‘a double chocolate brownie with ice cream and a sprig of mint stuck in the top, on the house, dusted with cocoa powder and icing sugar’ – to make her feel better.  The waiter’s kind, clueless gesture leaves Helen ‘touched and bewildered.’  Philippa Lowthorpe’s cinema version of H is for Hawk renders this episode faithfully and successfully.

    A few lines after the ones just quoted, Macdonald, as she starts to describe her experience of bereavement, explains that word’s derivation.  Etymology is an interest that she shared with her late father.  So was natural history, and particularly ornithology:  H is for Hawk tells of how, in the aftermath of her father’s death, Macdonald bought and trained a goshawk – ‘the wildest and maddest of raptors’, according to another character in the film.  Much of the book’s narrative comprises an account of that training and of Macdonald’s developing relationship with the bird.  Her memoir isn’t, of course, the first on the subject.  T H White got there many decades previously with The Goshawk, which Macdonald references extensively, so that H is for Hawk is partly a work of literary criticism and appreciation, too.  Despite the visual possibilities of the falconry, Macdonald’s memoir overall isn’t obviously suitable material for dramatisation; and while Emma Donoghue and Philippa Lowthorpe’s screenplay is thoughtful and skilful, H is for Hawk doesn’t always work as screen drama.  Plenty of it does, though, and the film is faithful to the original in important ways.

    The most important is Helen, played by Claire Foy.  In the book, Macdonald comes across as fiercely intelligent, single-minded, egocentric and, though you sympathise with her feelings of loss, not greatly likeable.  Alisdair Macdonald, a long-serving, much-respected press photographer, died at the age of sixty-eight.  His daughter takes it as read that losing him is a bigger deal for her than for her mother or her brother – and that isn’t just because Helen, as first-person narrator, is the book’s central consciousness.  The film doesn’t shy away from this.  Lowthorpe repeatedly illustrates Helen’s devotion to her father (Brendan Gleeson) and impatience with her mother (Lindsay Duncan).  This culminates in the eulogy delivered by Helen at Alisdair’s memorial service.  It’s natural, of course, for what she says there to focus on what he meant to her, but Helen shows no thought for her mother’s feelings – as when she tells the large gathering that she thinks her father ‘was the only person who really understood me’.

    From an early stage of her screen career, Claire Foy has been fearless in not seeming to mind if you don’t like the character she’s playing.  This is most striking in two of her leading television roles – in The Promise (2011) and Wolf Hall (2015), both directed by Peter Kosminsky – but it was also true of her characterisation of Neil Armstrong’s wife in Damien Chazelle’s First Man (2018).  Foy’s honesty as an actor makes her the ideal interpreter of Helen Macdonald – a kindred spirit in that she wasn’t apparently bothered whether a reader warmed to her.  Macdonald persuades you, through the quality of her writing, that she has a true story worth telling, and this connects with another instance of the film’s likeable (!) fidelity to the book.  Quite a few of the 115 minutes of running time are devoted to the repetitive hard work of training the hawk:  if you don’t enjoy this, Lowthorpe seems to say, then tough, because that practical business is central to Macdonald’s story.  Of course, the bird’s head magnetises the camera; and you do get an idea of Mabel’s character, as well as of Helen’s feelings for her.  But the screen H is for Hawk, like its source, is resolutely non-anthropomorphic.  As Helen makes explicitly clear, goshawks are ‘a non-affectionate species’.

    She speaks those words to a GP (Naomi Wirthner), who’s asking Helen questions to gauge whether she’s clinically depressed.  The film explores very effectively what the bird of prey means to her – no mean feat since Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue eschew voiceover narrative or interior monologues for Helen.  The hawk sustains a connection between Helen and her father, with whom she delighted in seeing, and from whom she learned much about, the natural world.  Her choice of name for the bird – Mabel is derived from the Latin amabilis (loved one, dear) – speaks for itself.  But the hawk isn’t any kind of substitute for the human being that Helen most loved, and Mabel in some ways embodies her owner’s new exposure to life’s mercilessness.  This comes through chiefly in nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw moments, as Mabel preys on other creatures.  She then ‘mantles’ them, enveloping the prey with her wings to prevent other predators getting a look in – the image is a bit reminiscent of a schoolkid shielding their work from the eyes of a nearby copycat (that’s me anthropomorphising, not the film).  When the bird, tethered to Helen’s hand, furiously flaps its wings, Claire Foy involuntarily flinches and steels herself to withstand the fury:  these moments correspond strongly with sequences that show Helen determinedly trying to subdue and conceal emotional frailty.  (The words ‘Grief Is the Thing with Feathers’ naturally come to mind.)

    H is for Hawk fails on screen when it tries to be a more conventional drama than it is, although you understand why this is happening:  the film has to sell tickets.  Soon after her father’s death, Helen has a one-night stand with an art dealer called Amar (Arty Froushan) – a crude means of ticking off a checklist item:  Helen’s in no state to have a continuing relationship QED.  More typical are curate’s-egg scenes.  At the start, Helen, who teaches history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, marches into a room of students to tell them they’re all going to the pub – the Eagle, where in 1953 Crick and Watson announced their discovery of DNA.  Her peremptory instruction, making the pub outing sound anything but fun, gives an early idea of the kind of personality she is, but when Helen then walks the students through the streets to the Eagle, lecturing en route, it smacks of Philippa Lowthorpe’s making things visually lively for no good reason except that if-it’s-a-film-it’s-got-to-move – and it doesn’t feel in character.  A subsequent public seminar is OK in what Helen has to say, yet clumsy in how she’s interrupted in midstream and nearly breaks down under pressure of hostile student questions.  Because her priority is Mabel, Helen arrives late for a meeting to discuss arrangements for her father’s memorial service and leaves as soon as it’s settled that she’ll deliver the eulogy.  The scene’s conception is too obvious, yet it’s saved by Helen’s businesslike remark as she agrees to do the eulogy.  She says she’s used to lecturing sizeable groups.

    During an earlier family meeting with the funeral planner, Helen unexpectedly gets the giggles, to infectious effect – her brother James (Josh Dylan) and their mother also crack up.  It’s a lovely, credible instance of laughter – family laughter – momentarily and unexpectedly displacing sorrow.  Also funny is a flashback, in which Helen and her father drive along a country road, chance upon a crime scene, and his photojournalist instincts kick in.  They laugh about this once the police have warned Alisdair off and they’re back on the road.  But when Helen invites Amar to dinner in college and they start sniggering at high table, it’s one outbreak of inappropriate laughter too many (in quick succession):  you sense that Lowthorpe is straining for moments of light relief, to make H is for Hawk easier to watch.  The challenge she faced in translating Macdonald’s memoir into biographical drama is epitomised by the music in evidence.  She doesn’t overuse Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s sensitive original score, yet the melancholy strings always seem to be reminding the audience what kind of film this is (even though it isn’t).  Levienaise-Farrouch’s music shares the soundtrack with the Shadows numbers played by Helen’s father in his car (‘Apache’, ‘FBI’, ‘Perfidia’), and which his daughter continues to play after he’s gone.  I’m thoroughly prejudiced in their favour, but I reckon the Shadows tracks are all the music Lowthorpe needs.

    The flashback scenes between Helen and her father consistently deliver – with not much material, Brendan Gleeson creates a remarkably complete character.  And though he’s outstanding among the supporting cast, he’s not the only good thing in it.  Lindsay Duncan does a fine job of showing Helen’s mother’s love for a daughter that she maybe doesn’t like much.  As Christina, Denise Gough is also effective, even though sequences involving this character usually feel like part of the film’s conventionalising agenda.  In smaller parts, Josh Dylan does well as James, and Sam Spruell is excellent as Stuart, her gently eccentric, supportive adviser on all things avian.  Even though she’s only on screen for a couple of minutes, Emma Cunniffe has real warmth as Stuart’s wife.

    As her commitment to Mabel intensifies, Helen becomes increasingly unsociable, sometimes refusing even to answer the door.  When Mum, James and his little daughter Aimee (Darcy Alexander) arrive unexpectedly, Helen tries but fails to send them away.  Her young niece wants to see the bird, and what follows is a very appealing exchange, as Helen, unusually animated, tells Aimee that her name and Mabel’s mean the same thing, and how lucky Aimee is to witness Mabel doing a poo.  Darcy Alexander’s wary excitement is taking; the conversation also gives Claire Foy the chance to show a different side to Helen.  The scene precedes the film’s climax and highlight, when Helen delivers the memorial service eulogy.  She’s still intent on containing her grief; she also must take the opportunity to express who her father was to her; Foy makes the contest between the two things thrilling and moving.  Her performance in H is for Hawk has been entirely overlooked by awards bodies, but Claire Foy’s portrait of Helen Macdonald is the best acting I’ve seen in a 2025 film.

    27 January 2026

     

  • Weapons

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Zach Cregger (2025)

    Writer-director Zach Cregger immediately announces his film’s mystery.  A child’s voiceover, accompanying images of the elementary school that she attends, describes the simultaneous disappearance of all but one of the pupils of a third-grade class there.  These seventeen children rose from their beds one night at 2.17 am and left their homes, the time confirmed by residential surveillance systems that also recorded the eight- or nine-year-olds running, all with arms rigidly outstretched, towards woodland into which they disappeared.  They’ve not been seen since.  The voiceover goes on to say that the local authorities, including the police, have tried to hush up the mass vanishing.  The start of Weapons certainly gets you interested in what’s coming.  After that, the film strays from its main business for a while, marking time until Cregger sets to solving the puzzle of the lost children.  By this point, he’s into full-blown horror-movie territory – in which, for better or worse, he’s more comfortable.

    He divides the narrative into six episodes, each focusing on a single character.  First, Justine (Julia Garner), the class teacher concerned.  Then Archer (Josh Brolin), whose son is one of the missing children; Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a police officer and Justine’s ex-boyfriend; James (Austin Abrams), a homeless hophead and petty criminal; and Marcus (Benedict Wong), the elementary school principal.  Last but far from least, Alex (Cary Christopher), the only member of Justine’s class who didn’t vanish.  For a while, it seems Cregger means to show the effect of the children’s disappearance on various citizens of Maybrook (a fictional small town, supposedly in Pennsylvania) – as if Weapons were sober social commentary, which it isn’t.  Besides, what has happened is far too big a deal for that – and too sensational to try to keep under wraps.  I didn’t understand why the never-identified child voiceover (Scarlett Sher) mentioned an attempted cover-up, except to give added spice to the intro.  It’s true the local police don’t appear to be working flat out to find the kids, but they’re not keeping things secret either.  How could they, when the story’s all over the press and TV news?

    Individual episodes sometimes move back in time, so that a sequence featured in one character’s story is reprised in another’s, even though shot from different angles and, thanks to the second episode, seen in a larger context.  For example, Archer’s section ends when Marcus attacks him at a petrol station.  In the Justine section, Marcus was decent and sane; when he launches himself at Archer, he’s become a monster; over the course of Marcus’s own episode, it’s made clear what transformed him.  A problem with the episodic structure is that some featured characters are tangential to the disappearance story – Paul especially, James too, until he breaks into Alex’s family’s house and makes a crucial discovery in its basement.  Also, we sometimes learn things about characters in what feels like the wrong order.  Justine’s own story presents her as emotionally erratic – ‘a troubled person’, in Archer’s phrase – in her professional and her private lives.  In a meeting at the school, she’s furiously censured by the missing kids’ parents, who are understandably suspicious that only Justine’s class has disappeared.  Justine’s daft responses – ‘I feel just as bad as you do’ – make matters worse.  Subsequent flashbacks in which she’s a capable, caring teacher arrive too late to matter much.

    A more important instance of Cregger’s impatience to show who people really are, comes in the case of a character that doesn’t even get her name on a chapter but who, once she arrives in Weapons, not only compels interest but virtually takes over the film.  Alex’s elderly relative, Gladys (Amy Madigan), is glimpsed in Justine’s and Archer’s nightmares, then by James, as he runs through the woods where the children went missing.  But her first full appearance comes at the school, for an interview with Marcus who, at Justine’s insistence, has asked to meet Alex’s family to check on how the boy’s doing outside school hours.  Gladys tells Marcus she’s looking after Alex because his parents are unwell.  She next turns up on Marcus’s doorstep, claiming she’s exhausted and pleading for water.  It’s his partner, Terry (Clayton Ferris), rather than Marcus, who agrees to let her in.  Once over the threshold, Gladys embarks on a ritual involving bloodied twigs and human hair that changes Marcus instantly into a homicidal maniac.  He kills Terry, hideously violently, before heading for the petrol station to do the same to Justine, who has bumped into and is arguing with Archer there.

    As Marcus launches himself at Justine, Archer intervenes and the men’s struggle gives her time to drive off.  Marcus runs after the car and – arms straight and stiff, like the disappearing children – into moving traffic, with fatal results.  Marcus and Terry were too polite to ask Gladys why she looked like someone out of a horror movie:  Amy Madigan’s fright wig and thick lipstick scream Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, with a whisper of the clown in It.  The wig is explained by the terminal illness from which Gladys is suffering; by the time the illness is revealed, though, Cregger has already proclaimed her the villain of the piece.  At the start of the ‘Alex’ episode, he flashes back to Gladys’ first arrival at the boy’s home.  Alex’s father (Whitmer Thomas) explains to his apprehensive son that Gladys, somehow related to Alex’s mother (Callie Schuttera), is coming to stay because she’s dying and has nowhere else to go.  Alex’s parents’ normality would be very effective if Gladys were introduced as innocuous, but Cregger couldn’t wait to expose her as a witch.

    ‘Alex’, by far the film’s longest episode, is dominated by Gladys.  De-wigged and without her garish make-up, as she sometimes is, Amy Madigan is expressive.  According to Wikipedia, Zach Cregger gave her ‘two options as to Gladys’s origin: one where she was a regular person using witchcraft [to] prevent her dying from an incurable condition, and one where she was instead an immortal creature performing an approximate simulacrum’.  What’s more ‘he did not ask her which one she chose’ – the implication being that Madigan makes it impossible to tell.  There’s no doubt that she blends malignity and mortal fear successfully:  her integrity as an actor probably impelled her to fuse Cregger’s options in favour of an either/or interpretation, and Madigan deserves the plaudits she’s getting for her work in Weapons.  The options are phony, even so.  Cregger’s plotting, building to Gladys’ grisly comeuppance, doesn’t allow for her to be anything other than an evil hag.  Once she is destroyed, life in Maybrook can return to normal, albeit very gradually according to the closing voiceover.  There’s no way, as things play out, that you can wonder if Gladys is just a ‘regular person’ trying her best to cheat death.

    Her bell-book-and-candle-plus-twigs routines turn people into puppets, whether missiles of destruction like Marcus, or zombies like Alex’s parents, whom Gladys threatens to make kill themselves if Alex spills the beans about what she’s up to.  She makes the boy steal from each of his classmates one of their belongings, which she uses to cast a spell on the children, drawing them from their homes, via the dark woods, to the basement in Alex’s house.  The idea seems to be that Gladys needs multiple ‘hosts’ on whose life force she can feed to counteract the disease eating away at her own body.  But since the children are being held in the basement, bewitched and benumbed, it’s hard to see how, unlike the unfortunate Marcus, they can be described as the ‘weapons’ apparently central to the whole set-up.  Cregger would presumably justify this in what the stockpiled children finally do to Gladys.  Using her own spells, Alex manages to turn her into the target.  His classmates pursue Gladys and eventually tear her body apart.

    Cregger’s first feature, Barbarian (2022), which I’ve not seen, was also a horror movie; his third feature, due out this year, will be the latest cinema reboot of the Resident Evil franchise.  He clearly has an excellent understanding of what his audience wants.  Barbarian, made for under $5m, earned over $45m; Weapons, which cost $38m, has so far taken $269m.  That compares proportionally well with even Ryan Coogler’s Sinners which, at the time of writing, has made around four times its production costs ($368m, against a budget of $90m-$100m).  Someone like me can complain all they want about the dramatic defects of Cregger’s instant-impact approach, but it’s being commercially vindicated in a big way.  Even in the ‘Paul’ and ‘James’ episodes, which hardly advance the story, he keeps the mayhem and injury detail coming.  As I usually find in horror cinema, Weapons has more images that are physically repellent than ideas that are psychologically horrific:  Cregger has a particular penchant for flesh being pricked or scraped or ripped open.

    Still, Weapons is entertaining, and Amy Madigan’s isn’t the only good performance in it.  Josh Brolin’s Archer is quite a persuasive aggressive hero.  Cary Christopher’s Alex is believably an outsider among his classmates (some of whom bully him).  As the local police chief, Toby Huss brings a leavening air of sanity to proceedings.  That Weapons has received one Oscar nomination (Madigan as Best Supporting Actress) and Sinners a ridiculous, record-breaking sixteen, has plenty to do with the latter’s scope for politically significant interpretation.  (Cregger’s cast, except for Benedict Wong, is all white.)  Watching Weapons also made me realise that to be impressed by scary supernatural films, I nearly always need to read them as allegories.  There are rare, fine exceptions – Dead of Night (1945) and The Innocents (1961) come instantly to mind – but I tend to find stories in this genre too silly to be taken neat.  Perhaps this one is allegorical, though.  Zach Cregger has said that the Weapons children’s outstretched arms are inspired by the young Vietnamese girl, burned by napalm, in that notorious Vietnam War news photograph.  You’d think he would have kept quiet about this inspiration for what’s an undoubtedly striking image, yet Cregger has suggested, outrageously, that, by making use of the photograph, he’s evoking ‘trauma, innocence lost, and horror’.  It seems to be de rigueur for every Hollywood filmmaker today to make claims, however bogus, that their work has moral and political ‘meaning’.

    21 January 2026

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