Claire Foy Leads Sensitive if Slow Grief Drama

Helen (Claire Foy) is not the kind of woman to wallow in her emotions. After her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson) passes, she insists she’s not moping (“Dad would hate any kind of moping”); when loved ones ask if she’s okay, she dismisses their concerns and tells them she’s just fine.

But a grief as large as Helen’s does not simply disappear because it’s denied language or tears. It simply finds other methods of expression. A few months after her dad’s death, Helen adopts a goshawk, one of the birds of prey she and he so used to love spotting on their bird watching expeditions, and immediately makes it her whole world.

H Is for Hawk, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and co-written by Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue based on Helen Macdonald’s memoir of the same title, is the tale of that rather unusual coping mechanism. As an appreciation of birds and our connection to them, it’s engrossing and endearing — a fresher take, certainly, than yet another weepie about dog or cat owners. But as an exploration of grief, it’s hindered by a 128-minute run time that spreads its emotional potency too thin.

Initially, Helen seems to be handling the death of her father, the photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, as well as might reasonably be expected of anyone who’s just lost what she calls “the only person in the world who truly understood me.” She carries on with her teaching fellowship at Cambridge University, and makes plans to apply for a prestigious new job. She hangs out with her best friend, Christina (Denise Gough, here as likable as her Andor character is despicable). She even starts dating a handsome art dealer, Amar (Arty Froushan), whom she’s met on Twitter. (H Is for Hawk takes place in 2007, making them very early adopters.)

But once Amar leaves, she falls apart, though the breakup seems less the cause of her breakdown than the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s at this point that she decides to buy Mabel, the goshawk, and falls head over heels in love at first sight. To Helen, Mabel is no mere distraction, nor a pet, nor a hobby — Mabel is her hunting partner, as she’ll snap to anyone who dares invoke any of those other words.

Especially at first, H Is for Hawk might seem a strong argument for taking up falconry. Mabel, or rather the trained bird actors who play her, is a delightfully magnetic presence on camera, with her wide alert eyes, her handsome feathers and her fascinatingly inhuman movements. DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen captures both Mabel herself and the gorgeousness of the forests and fields that she takes as her hunting grounds with a real sense of reverence. If anything, it’s harder to understand why others — like Stu (Sam Spruell), a friend and fellow falconer — had warned Helen against getting a goshawk in the first place, given that Mabel seems generally well-behaved for a wild predator.

But the grief seeps through. The script, by Lowthorpe and Donoghue, is particularly well-observed when it comes to the almost comical oddness of mourning. In one scene, Helen tells a restaurant server her father has just died, and he returns with a plate piled high with desserts as if unsure what else to do. In another, Helen and her brother, James (Josh Dylan), choke back giggles over the funeral director’s somber question of whether they might want a “themed” coffin decorated in ridiculously tacky nature designs.

Foy, who previously worked with Lowthorpe on Netflix’s The Crown, does an excellent job of capturing Helen’s stiff-upper-lip repression, with gestures as small as the way she brushes away the tears that occasionally leak through — as if they’re mere physical annoyances rather than reflections of inner turmoil.

The more Helen becomes fixated on Mabel, the more she seems to dim in every other aspect of her life. She flakes on her job, ignores questions about her future, distances herself from her friends and family. On rare occasions when she’s forced to leave the house for non-Mabel reasons, she might bring Mabel with her — leading to the funny-sad sight of partygoers giving this woman with a bird a very wide berth — or else grit her teeth through an unbearable cacophony of mindless chatter and grating music.

It’s a sensitive portrayal of a person’s slide into depression. The issue is that H Is for Hawk mistakes “gradual” for “slow.” The film feels baggy with a few too many repetitions of scenes or ideas we’ve seen already, making it hard for the film’s emotions to pick up the momentum they need; a tighter edit might have distilled those feelings down to a more powerful form.

But then, the patience required is in keeping with Helen and her father’s favorite hobby. “Watch carefully so you remember what you’ve seen,” he tells her as they search the skies with their binoculars for interesting birds. Flashbacks to their happier days are interspersed throughout the film, triggered by details as small as the scrape on his arm that never had time to heal, or the seating arrangement in a car she’s inherited from him. Helen’s adoration for her dad casts him in a nearly angelic glow, frequently backlit by a bright white sun that might be beaming from the gates of Heaven themselves. But Gleeson’s relaxed performance nevertheless ensures he feels like a human being, rather than some sentimental symbol of parental perfection.

The symbolism, instead, is left up to the bird. Mabel might be Helen’s dad, or Helen’s grief, or Helen herself; she’s a reminder that death comes for us all, or that nature is full of beautiful and awe-inspiring things. I found myself wondering what Mabel herself would make of all this messy human emotion. Then I caught myself, realizing I too was probably projecting too much of myself onto a bird who never asked to be here.