Claire Foy and a goshawk headline adaptation of Helen MacDonald memoir

Philippa Lowthorpe’s film H Is for Hawk stars Claire Foy alongside a trained goshawk in an adaptation of Helen MacDonald’s award‑winning memoir, and is playing in theaters. The story follows Helen MacDonald (Foy), who, after the sudden death of her father (Brendan Gleeson) while finishing a fellowship at Cambridge, seeks a companion and acquires a wild goshawk with help from Stuart (Sam Spruell); Denise Gough plays Helen’s friend Christina.

Lowthorpe co-wrote the screenplay with Emma Donoghue; the memoir was published in 2014 and its author has since come out as nonbinary, though the film uses she/her pronouns for the character. Cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen and Lowthorpe give extensive screen time to the hawk, dubbed Mabel, with close shots of her feathers, eyes, talons and hunting, and the production shows Foy learning to handle the bird and struggling when Mabel bates and flies.

Reviewer Alissa Wilkinson calls Mabel the film’s best element and praises the film’s refusal to make grief facile, but finds the overall structure uneven, noting the difficulty of translating the memoir’s interior perspective to the screen and that some threads—such as Helen’s inquiry into how social and cultural constraints shape science—remain underdeveloped.

Julian of Norwich’s phrase 'All shall be well' recurs in the film.

Key Topics

Culture, Claire Foy, Helen Macdonald, Philippa Lowthorpe, Goshawk, Cambridge