Helen Macdonald uses they/them pronouns, but, at the time this movie takes place, used she/her pronouns. This article uses they/them pronouns when talking about Macdonald in the present tense, and she/her to distinguish the character played by Claire Foy in the film.
To anyone who has experienced grief of any kind, there’s a recognizable pattern that takes over. Sometimes, after a loss, you throw yourself into something so fully — work, hobbies, romance, whatever it may be — as a way to make sure you have no time to think about anything else, especially not the person who died.
In 2007, writer Helen Macdonald handled the sudden passing of their father (Alisdair Macdonald, the famed photojournalist) by diving back into a hobby they’d long left in the past: Macdonald purchased a hawk.
The year that Macdonald spent training that hawk turned into the 2014 memoir “H is for Hawk,” which has been adapted into a film by director Philippa Lowthorpe with a script from Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue. On its face, “H is for Hawk” feels like your standard sort of weepy film about grief, and someone saved by the healing power of animal connection. But Helen’s story is more complex than that. Sometimes, the very thing that’s keeping you sane is also the thing that’s driving you crazy — the thing that grounds you can also be the thing that keeps you isolated. “H is for Hawk” considers the thorniness of that idea, accentuated by the beauty of Charlotte Bruus Christensen’s cinematography and anchored by a quietly moving lead performance from Claire Foy.
About halfway through the film, during her first hunt with the hawk (whom Helen names Mabel), Helen gets frightened when Mabel disappears from view. “She’s not fine,” she screams when someone tries to soothe her. “She’s gonna get f*cking lost!”
That line is one of the more obvious examples of Helen’s identification with the hawk. The scariest thing imaginable to Helen is getting lost, because she has the sinking feeling that she already is. The death of her father (Brendan Gleeson), whom she worshiped, is the worst thing that’s happened to her recently, but it’s not the only bad thing. Her fellowship at Cambridge is about to end, and she has no idea what she’s going to do next. Helen’s romantic life is also out of sorts — in an early scene, she stands hidden by her curtains as she gazes longingly at a man who left the moment she dared to bare her soul.
In the wake of Alisdair’s death, Helen slowly floats into a depressive state, one that’s only slightly buoyed by the arrival of Mabel the hawk. A goshawk, to be more precise — the hardest type to train. As Helen’s family friend Stuart (Sam Spruell) puts it: “A perfectly evolved psychopath.”
Much like Mabel, Helen is a solitary being intent on avoiding the outside world. Lowthorpe emphasizes that sense of isolation visually and sonically. Helen refuses to engage with any of her responsibilities besides Mabel, whether the pair are hunting in untamed country or spending long, shuttered sequences in Helen’s home alone. Even when Helen does venture into reality, she’s always separate. She walks alone with Mabel down a crowded street, passersby giving them a wide berth, every tire screech or shop door jingle holding the weight of an explosion. Helen attends faculty parties with Mabel in tow, her coworkers lightly interested, but always eventually leaving her standing alone in the corner, Mabel perched on her arm.
In some ways, the hawk is Helen, but she’s also a replacement of sorts for what Helen has lost. “I think he was the only person in the world who truly understood me,” Helen says about Alisdair. Mabel has taken up that mantle, but she’s also still so completely alien, as soothing to Helen as she is terrifying. In her interactions with the hawk, Foy is remarkable, her calming presence underpinned by the intense longing that lines her face — longing to finally be a part of something she understands again.
“H is for Hawk” walks a tough line, finding exhilaration in Helen’s experiences with Mabel, but also recognizing how Helen’s obsession with Mabel has kept her from fully moving on, from fully dealing with the weight of her father’s death. In some ways, Helen is staring death in the face everyday — hunting alongside Mabel, bearing witness as the hawk gives into her instincts and delivers on the natural courses of the world. Christensen’s cinematography emphasizes the freedom of the landscapes, and the wildlife photography of Mabel’s hunts is stunning.
After one particular kill, Helen sits down next to Mabel on the forest floor and wipes her forehead, leaving behind a trail of blood fresh from Mabel’s kill. Helen is at ease with the ways in which death unfolds in the natural world — there’s a sense and a purpose to it, a logic. But where is the sense in a man dropping dead out of nowhere in the middle of the street? Where is the sense in picking out a casket, or in making funeral preparations? Helen loves and understands Mabel’s world, but it’s not the one where she belongs. Her journey, then, is finding a way to make sense of her own world — finding a way to keep Mabel without losing herself.