This is a tasteful but somewhat unmoving adaptation of writer Helen MacDonald’s memoir, which in 2014 won the Samuel Johnson and Costa book prizes. MacDonald was an academic lecturing in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, when their father, Alisdair MacDonald the press photographer, died suddenly.
Grieving and inspired by their shared love of observing birds, MacDonald bought a wild goshawk and brought it home. The writer named the bird Mabel and painstakingly trained it to fly to the hand and hunt. The resulting book elegantly interweaves a meditation on loss with a naturalist’s account of falconry, echoing TH White (the Arthurian novelist) who had followed a similar path in 1951 with The Goshawk.
Much of the book’s pleasure comes from its elliptical, poetic meditations on grief (and the parallel biography of TH White) but that has been jettisoned to make H is for Hawk into a linear and more conventional narrative. And while Helen MacDonald identifies as non-binary and neurodivergent, that isn’t touched on in the film which presents a more conventional heroine, here seen as faintly wistful after a brief heterosexual fling.
The remaining family – a widowed mother played by Lesley Duncan and a brother barely feature – while the most consistent emotional support comes from Denise Gough, playing MacDonald’s sparky friend Christina. It all feels a little thin in terms of characters and narrative development. All too often the script gives the impression that other people have been brought in to deliver dialogue that doesn’t stray far from basic exposition about falconry.
While one can only admire Claire Foy’s devotion to the role – the actor trained with goshawks in real time, a painstaking process – her performance as the introverted academic suffering from depression is a touch too closed off to be really engaging. There’s also a weary tastefulness in the scenes set in Cambridge with all the cliches of gown-wearing students, High Table rituals and academic snobbery.
Director Phillipa Lowthorpe, who did an excellent job telling the story of the imprisoned British-Iranian academic Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Prisoner 951 for the BBC last year. Some of the isolation and despair felt by the heroine in that story is echoed here in Claire Foy's introspection at home while training Mabel. But Lowthorpe also turned the childrens' classic Swallows and Amazons into a feature film and has directed episodes of The Crown and Call the Midwife , which may account for the way a lot of the scenes in H is for Hawk will comfortably appeal to audiences who enjoy heritage imagery – the grandeur of the College’s medieval dining hall and the city’s cobbled streets all get a familiar golden glow.
While the sequences with the goshawk in flight are beautifully composed, there aren’t quite enough of them to make this a worthy successor to Kes or to compensate lovers of the original book. They might want to ask the BBC to put the 2017 documentary MacDonald made about training another goshawk (some years after the book became a bestseller), back on IPlayer where they can get a real glimpse of the rapture the right raptor can inspire.
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