H Is For Hawk Soars With Raw Portrayal Of Grief

On January 23, 2026, cinemas across the globe welcomed a quietly ambitious new film: H Is for Hawk, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and adapted by Emma Donoghue from Helen Macdonald’s acclaimed memoir. At first glance, it might seem an unlikely candidate for a cinematic adaptation—a deeply personal, almost meditative study of grief, falconry, and the strange ways humans try to heal. Yet, as audiences and critics alike are discovering, the film’s blend of raw emotion, nature’s wildness, and understated performances has struck a chord.

At the heart of H Is for Hawk is Helen, played with remarkable restraint and depth by Claire Foy. Helen is a Cambridge academic, a lecturer on the history of science, whose life is upended by the sudden death of her beloved father, Alisdair (Brendan Gleeson), a celebrated photojournalist. As described by The Irish Times, Helen’s response to her loss is anything but conventional: she adopts a goshawk, naming her Mabel, and throws herself—body and soul—into the demanding world of falconry.

It’s a premise that sounds eccentric on paper. But, as MovieJawn notes, the film is less about the mechanics of bird training and more about the unpredictable, often messy journey through grief and depression. The opening scenes draw viewers into Helen’s seemingly content life: her passion for birdwatching, her close friendships, her academic success. All of that is shattered in a single phone call. The moment is rendered with aching realism—dialogue fades, the score swells, and the world blurs as Helen’s loss becomes immediate and visceral. Anyone who has lost someone dear will recognize that moment when, as MovieJawn puts it, “the air flies out of the room and all you can do is stand in shock until the truth of the situation hits.”

From there, the film plunges into Helen’s private world of mourning. Through flashbacks, viewers glimpse her relationship with her father—his love of nature, his career capturing both the everyday and the historic (from hidden waterways to Princess Diana’s wedding). These memories are not just narrative devices; the film incorporates real photographs taken by Helen Macdonald’s actual father, grounding the story in lived experience.

Helen’s decision to bring Mabel into her life is as much an act of desperation as it is of passion. Goshawks, as the film makes clear, are not pets. In fact, a bird expert in the film calls them “the wildest and maddest of raptors … perfectly evolved psychopaths.” Their fierce independence and predatory instincts make them challenging companions—hardly a source of comfort in the traditional sense. Yet, as Claire Foy herself explained in an interview with The Globe and Mail, “Mabel represented disconnection, a way of rising above the human concerns of connection, love, loss. Mabel could choose to leave at any time when Helen is flying her free. Walking that tightrope is what love is. That’s the risk you take.”

Much of the film’s power comes from its refusal to offer easy answers or tidy resolutions. Helen’s grief is not something to be solved or overcome; it’s something to be lived with, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes painfully. Scenes of her neglecting daily life—dishes piling up, classes skipped, her home in disarray—are rendered with painful honesty. In one particularly affecting sequence, Helen spends an entire day lying immobile in a cardboard box, unable even to answer the door. The film doesn’t shy away from the realities of depression, nor does it try to dress them up for cinematic effect.

Yet, for all its heaviness, H Is for Hawk is not without moments of levity and beauty. Lowthorpe and Donoghue excel at capturing the sometimes absurd, darkly comic textures of mourning: a waiter offering a free brownie upon hearing of a death, siblings stifling laughter over tastelessly themed coffins. These moments, as The Irish Times observes, “excel at capturing the darkly comic textures of mourning.”

The film’s visual language is equally compelling. Cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen brings forests, fields, and skies to life with a reverence that borders on the spiritual. The scenes of falconry are particularly striking—thrilling drone shots capture Helen and Mabel zipping through trees, soaring above fields, or hunting in tall grass. These sequences, as Donoghue explained, were meticulously choreographed; “I was creating this intense little dyad of Helen and Mabel. But you can’t get a hawk to act. You can’t train it to please you. They don’t want to please you, they want to hunt. So the hunting had to be done for real.” In fact, the film used several different goshawks, with the producer buying six baby chicks during the COVID-19 pandemic delay to ensure the birds would be ready for filming.

The authenticity extends to Foy’s performance, which has received universal praise. She trained with goshawks for two weeks before filming and continued throughout the seven-week shoot. Her interactions with Mabel—whether pulling off the bird’s hood with her teeth or reacting to the hawk’s unpredictable behavior—never feel staged. As MovieJawn notes, “There is not a single moment in which I question if she is truly present with her hawk.”

But perhaps the film’s greatest achievement is its refusal to simplify the human-animal relationship. As Donoghue points out, “Mabel shapes Helen as Helen is shaping Mabel. There are so many interesting parallels between grief and the hawk, Helen and the hawk, the hawk as death, but as life as well.” The film resists the easy trope of animal stories where the creature’s death signals the end of innocence. Instead, Helen’s bond with Mabel is complicated, sometimes fraught, but ultimately transformative.

This complexity is mirrored in the film’s structure. H Is for Hawk is patient, even exasperatingly still at times. Some critics have noted its narrative stagnation and emotional repetition. The film ends abruptly, without a satisfying or happy conclusion. But as MovieJawn argues, “it’s hard to dislike the film for those reasons as they perfectly echo the grieving process. Mourning a loved one is a long, meandering, and at times backwards healing process that is never fully concluded.”

In a cinematic landscape often dominated by spectacle and simple resolutions, H Is for Hawk stands out for its honesty and its willingness to embrace the messy, unpredictable nature of loss. As Foy herself says, “The more conversations we can have about the inevitable, and bring things out in the open in a way that’s full of love, will hopefully make people feel less alone.” For anyone who has ever grieved, or wondered how to move forward after loss, this film offers no easy answers—just the comfort of knowing you’re not alone in the struggle.