★★★ (3 out of 4)
“The Crown” Emmy winner Claire Foy gives an intuitive, indelible performance in “H is for Hawk,” but her unknown costar glides off with the acting honors in this alternately bracing and bumpy biopic. The newcomer is a goshawk named Mabel, who changes the life of Foy’s character, British author Helen Macdonald, a Cambridge scholar and naturalist acclaimed for writing about how humans relate or foolishly don’t to the natural world.
Macdonald, who is non-binary and uses they/she pronouns, is the daughter of photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, played by the reliably superb Brendan Gleeson. The two bonded strongly over their love for birding and falconry, leaving Helen shattered over the death of the man she called —sorry, mom—“the only person in the world who ever understood me.” In just a few scenes, Foy and Gleeson make that connection achingly real.
“H is for Hawk” is based on Macdonald’s 2014 memoir that describes the year Helen spent after the death of her beloved father training a Eurasian goshawk—that’s Mabel—a bird of prey attached to Helen’s wrist by a leather strap. The breeder who sold the bird to Helen has sound advice on how to relax Mabel: “Let her have a good round of murder.”
The film, directed by “Call the Midwife” BAFTA winner Philippa Lowthorpe, dawdles over the preliminaries of Helen teaching, looking for a new job and swanning around with her bestie Christina, sweetly played by “Andor” viper Denise Gough. Helen even dates hottie art dealer Amar (Arty Froushan) and the conventionality of it all stops the show in an already overlong movie when Mabel is, by divine right, the main attraction.
Their meeting is classic, love-at-first-sight romcom as Helen’s eyes lock onto Mabel’s. When the breeder says he made a mistake, claiming a goshawk in another box is the one intended for Helen, we know that will never fly. It’s these two or nothing.
Says the breeder of the bird of prey adopted by naturalist Claire Foy: ‘Let her have a good round of murder.’
It’s not an easy intro with Mabel flapping her wings in fear, even when covered in a hood. It takes three days for Mabel to even eat in front of her new handler. But the relationship grows and never —to the credit of all— in a cutesy Disney manner. To Helen, Mabel is not a pet or a toy—she’s a hunter and true to her nature, as filmed by Mark Payne-Gill in the wild and cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen in moments with Foy.
In earlier scenes, Mabel cohabits awkwardly with Helen in cramped quarters, even walking together in crowded Cambridge streets that ruffle Mabel’s feathers. But once free in the countryside, Mabel soars. I was so electrified by these scenes that I felt crushed to learn that Mabel had a handful of stand-ins to do the tougher parts. But those eyes in those closeups, that’s Mabel and I won’t hear differently.
Foy, a tough bird herself when the situation demands—forget her insipid wallflower in “Little Dorrit” and think of her controlling force in “Women Talking”—matches up perfectly with her avian costar. Since there’s no telling a goshawk how to act, Foy was encouraged to react in the moment to whatever Mabel did. The result is unfakably compelling.
“H Is for Hawk” bogs down whenever it overindulges in the grief porn that “Hamnet” handled with soulful restraint. Helen can’t find words for feelings, and when the tears do fall, they are quickly wiped away with an aversion to sentiment shared by Alisdair.
As I interpret this screen take on Macdonald’s astringent book, Helen doesn’t see Mabel as a substitute for a deceased father but as a tribute to the beauty and terror of nature that father and daughter both respected and shared. Does raising Mabel help Helen process grief? Without a doubt. But the point for both Helen and Mabel is to break free of their respective cages. Hawks are naturally solitary, humans are not. And watching Helen learn the difference is what makes “H is for Hawk” such a hypnotic and haunting gift.