Get stiff upper lips – not even Queen Elizabeths – has ever been stiffer than that Claire Foy Sports throughout the better part of Philippa Lowthorpes ”H is for hawk“Which is adapted from Helen MacDonald’s deserving omnipotent 2014 Grief Memoral of the same name. Foy of course plays a version of the author (her character uses she/her pronoun, while MacDonald identifies as a non-binary), a smooth Cambridge Akademisk that develops an all-consuming to the Falconry.
But where the book had the advantage of MacDonald’s beautiful and searching internal monologue, chooses the film to formulate her pain – as well as her refusal to process it – from the outside. That decision leaves us to read chapters that are worth doing what is a new reinforcement to the rocky resistance in Foy’s scowl, just as Helen assumes that she is as to the expression of the explicit face
At some level, the double -sided inaccessibility is crucial to a story of two undisturbing creatures whose survival depends on their mutual ability to share “an honest meeting with death”, but honesty is not the problem of this adaptation. Excludes some of the very script -like scenarios like Lowthorpe and co -author Emma Donoghue (by “Room“Fame) strives for under filmThe third act, “H is for Hawk” is too rooted in the truth in its source material-and too founded by the pure reality to look at Foy react to shades of her spring with a star-to suffer a lack of credibility. The problem here has less to do with Verisimilitude than commitment; This story of the power and talk of emotional projection simply does not inspire enough feeling for us to see a lot of something on one of its two empty screens.
Blank or not, Helen is hardly a passive character. She takes after her father (Brendan Gleeson, lived in and raspscally in Staccato flashbacks that encompasses his part), a photojournalist who revolved the world as a curious hunter and never left home without his camera-the last pictures he ever took snapped when he collapsed to the ground from a heart attack. His work taught him to look for the angle in everything, even death, and so moping is excluded when Helen learns about her father’s passing. In fact, Helen’s first reaction is to go out for dinner with her best friend, Christina (“Andor“Breakout Denise Gough, much nicer here), where their waiter gives her a” sorry your dad died “desert barrels (the most fun moment in a movie that never risks being too bleak).
It soon becomes clear that Helen, whose love for her father is painted in such a broad kind that it never feels like more than a vague idea, is clinically unable to accept that he is gone. “When you are broken, you run,” MacDonald writes. “But you don’t always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards.” Helen runs against Falconry at full speed. In fact, her dad is hardly in the ground before she buys a goshawk from any guy she found on the internet – a goshawk that becomes her whole personality at the moment she brings it home. She names it Mabel.
Funny fact: birds of prey are so piloted by the view that one thing is essentially not for them if they cannot see it in their field of view – they are the perfect pet for someone who lives in extremely denial. Apart from the fact that Mabel is not a pet as much as she is an steadfast housekeeper who shit on the floor, lurks out if you look her directly in the eye and support a diet with raw meat that she refuses to eat until she is good and ready. She is, as a person describes her species, a “perfectly developed psychopath”, but that predator is more a function than a fault with regard to Helen, since the bird’s absolute indifference to death is precisely what our heroine hopes to internalize herself.
The former “H is for Hawk” comes alive during the often scenes in Helen training Mabel to trust her, come back to her when she calls and eventually chase with her. The binding is not formed overnight. For starters, Foy Helen plays as someone who has an Apache Gunship-like death machine that is strapped to her arm, and even if the actress underwent extensive training for the role, you get the feeling that it was probably not a struggle for her to get character during these scenes. Like Tom Cruise, who drives a motorcycle from a cliff or Werner Herzog that pulls a steamer over a hill (not personally, but you know what I mean), there is a visceral tension to the undeniable fact of what Foy does, and Lowthorpes awake but incomplete direction the smartly emphasizes the lack of fagery when it can.
The Verisimilitude makes Helen’s denial so real that it makes her grief seem more real, even though it is only in her refusal to admit it. She is becoming increasingly manic when it comes to Mabel at the same rate as she is becoming increasingly indifferent to everything else – her appearance, the class she teaches and her loved ones (including Lindsay Duncan as her mother). Helen gets more wild when Mabel becomes easier to control, and the same woman who lost everything to help a massive spider back outside at the beginning of the movie soon creeps with her bird when it struggles rabbits in half with her beak.
“H is for Hawk” Strains to articulate the process by which helen bottoms out (in the movie’s clumsiest scene, she gives a class talk that ends with her screaming “we’re all going to die!” To a bunch of starting trail), and only free. She and Mabel have a fundamentally different relationship relationship with death – that humanity is as impossible for her to escape as it is for the goshawk to achieve. Yes, there will forever be a hole in her heart, but it is only because she and her father could bind on a deeper level than playing catch with some paper balls (the closest that Mabel may show something as affection).
In his book MacDonald writes that “In my time with Mabel, I have learned how you feel more human when you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like not to be.” In the superior movie Lowthorpe has made of it (which ends for all eternity to compensate for lost time and enjoying its newly acquired feelings), the hard winning education is expressed with all the shade of “My octopus teacher.”
When Helen finally allows herself to process her father’s loss and thus invites us to do it with her, it does not feel like she found her way back to something she ran from as much as it feels like she was caught as a fleeting from her own grief and withdrew to meet the world’s assessment against her will. For our part, we leave more like her goshawk: heads snapped, stare empty, stomach hungry for raw meat.
Rating: C+
“H is for Hawk” premiere at 2025 Tellurid Film festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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