H for Hawk Review – Claire Foy is all too real in this bizarre drama of grief | London Film Festival 2025

CGoshawk training is a cure for sadness? Or treat it in some way? Will keeping him indoors – with a hood on so he stays cool – and then taking him out hunting, allow you to radically reconnect with nature in a way that annoying townspeople will never understand? Or is this just a domesticated festival of cruelty to birds and prey and symptoms of serious depression?

Philippa Lowthorpe’s interesting and endearingly performed if slightly precious film – based on Helen Macdonald’s 2014 best-selling nature memoir – answers these questions, but it can’t deliver the Hollywood redemption narrative it seems to offer: the story of a woman in the depths of depression who is helped through the darkness, we have to assume, on the other side, by a goshawk, oddly named Mabel. (McDonald used he/she pronouns at time of publication and came out as non-binary in 2022.)

Viewers may think, by the closing credits, that they still don’t quite know what happens to Helen and Mabel at the end, or perhaps at what point, but then again real life can seem messy and incomplete that way.

Macdonald is played by Claire Foy in 2007, a fellow of Jesus College in Cambridge who teaches the history and philosophy of science. She adores and hero-worships her father, award-winning photographer Alisdair MacDonald, played here by Brendan Gleeson, who instilled in her a love of nature, and when he dies she is completely distraught.

So, Helen imagines a vague need to buy a goshawk from a dealer. She enlists fellow expert Stuart (Sam Spruell) to help with her training and becomes a wonderfully eccentric Cambridge native to keep Mabel on her watch at college but then worries too much for her mother (Lindsay Duncan) not to leave the house: Helen and Mabel descend into misery together.

Claire Foy clearly does it for real: she’s clearly learned how to handle goshawks, and her scenes have a tremendous realism to them. When she seems nervous with Mabel, she’s really nervous. When she’s thrilled to make Mabel do something, she’s truly thrilled. With this bird there can be no “acting”. The best moment comes when Helen is with Mabel in the car, and Clarice Starling appears to have taken Dr. Lecter for a drive.

Did the relationship between Helen and Mabel deepen by the end? Is there actually a relationship? Maybe this could be scheduled for a season of movies about people getting up close and personal with predators, along with Loach Kes, Hitchcock’s The Birds, and Herzog’s Grizzly Man. Mabel’s icy cold gaze was extremely frightening.