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
