H IS FOR HAWK

Philippa Lowthorpe’s H IS FOR HAWK, based on the memoir by naturalist Helen Macdonald, is a surprisingly comforting and deeply spiritual story of loss, solitude and an extraordinary bond with the wild. Claire Foy, beloved for THE CROWN, stars as Helen.

After the sudden death of her father (Brendan Gleeson), a respected photojournalist with an infectious sense of wonder about the world, Helen begins to lose her footing. Her work feels increasingly meaningless; she withdraws from her family and loneliness closes in. Everything changes when she takes on a magnificent goshawk and names her Mabel – from the Latin for “lovable”. Helen throws herself into training the bird, and an intense bond begins to form between them. She comes to see Mabel as both refuge and guide, hoping that life alongside this fierce, untamed creature might ease her grief and teach her how to inhabit the world again. But as Helen retreats further into Mabel’s world, a troubling question emerges: is she finding her way back to life, or disappearing into the wild?

Lowthorpe turns Helen’s memories into an intimate journey through mourning, anchored by Foy’s finely judged performance, in which barely contained sadness sits alongside an almost childlike awe at the natural world. The sequences of Mabel in flight and on the hunt have the arresting beauty of the finest wildlife filmmaking, while the hawk itself becomes a way of escaping a reality Helen can no longer bear – recalling the British tradition of KES.

H IS FOR HAWK is ultimately a deeply affecting story about a person paralysed by grief learning, slowly and painfully, to take flight again.

Text: Michał Sołtysek