And 'A' is for 'Avoiding difficult emotions and people in general'
dir: Philippa Lowthorpe
2025
When they talk about books that couldn’t or shouldn’t be made into movies, they’re talking about books like the one this movie is based on. I acknowledge the irony of my writing that in a review of said film, just like I acknowledge the lands of the First Nations people upon which I unleash my dribble from.
Sovereignty was never ceded. Anyway, I am lucky enough, blessed enough to have read the book, and I remember being deeply moved and affected by it, seeing as I read it at a time when I was also grieving for a beloved parent that I had lost at the time. The writing was precise, exquisite, evocative, and transporting.
It was also about a person at a very difficult, very fraught period in her life, rendered into a successful art form, but still predominately about the most muddled, harrowing, isolating, claustrophobic, mentally unstable time of her life. And you can get away with that, so to speak, in a novel, because one has the perspective, the elocution and erudition of this author, in order to capture all of that, with the distance afforded by time.
Short of having reams and reams of voiceover, which this flick never uses, we do not have access to the author’s thoughts, or, since the lead actor is playing the author here, the character’s thoughts other than what she does, what she says, or what expressions we see on her face.
I just don’t see how audiences who haven’t read the novel would be able to get as much from this flick. The story’s scope, rendered visually, is so narrow, in a lot of ways, so limiting.
Without the eloquent prose of the book, you have a story about a woman who loses her father, whom she loved dearly, who cannot either handle her grief or acknowledge her grief, who lets everything else (job, friends, family, paying bills, hygiene) fall by the wayside as she fixates on a goshawk she calls Mabel.
Watching the film, you’d be like “How random!” Though there are an array of movies, even just recently where someone, usually a fairly famous actor, acts with a mostly CGI bird. It’s almost like a rite of middle-age passage. There was…Naomi Watts and some magpie? Steve Coogan and some penguin? Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and some parrot?
You kinda get that it’s not about the bird itself, but then it’s also all about the bird? I mean the beautiful, majestic goshawk does look incredible, close up and in flight, with those piercing eyes, and those monstrous talons and a beak that can pierce through flesh and bone with ease?
I greatly admire Claire Foy for taking this role. It’s not always easy to take on a role, playing a living person, playing a person struggling mightily with mental health issues. But putting that to the side for a moment, I have to applaud her for taking on a role where she is clearly wrangling an actual goshawk, and at no stage, because she’s that good of an actor, does she exhibit fear when the bird is going berserk and trying to fly away / claw her eyes out. She must have been, at least initially, and I’m making a lot of assumptions here, fucking terrified, because I know I would have been.
Not only is she a trooper, she’s a rock solid performer, so times when she’s exhibiting joy at what the goshawk can do, what Mabel can do, that joy really comes across. We know, without having to be told explicitly, that she’s doing this because her dad died, we get that. What we don’t get, and which thankfully they don’t have to set out explicitly until near the end for us, is why it consumes her to the exclusion of everything else, of the whole world.
There is a natural amount of frustration we might feel watching Helen make or not make certain choices, and that’s okay, but it’s not helpful to rail against those choices like they are flaws in the story or in making the movie in the first place: If you reduce what people do and what people should have done to a sequence of if/then statements, then you could practically eradicate the need to art completely. If she had done this or that differently, well, we wouldn’t have this story to read or this film to watch. So what’s helpful about that?
When we see Helen very unfortunately hiding from visitors, avoiding human contact, or neglecting herself as if that somehow stops her from feeling the loss of her father (ably and genially played by Brendon Gleeson), we’re meant to feel that ache, to understand at least why a person might be so avoidant. If you can’t handle that, or handle watching someone struggling with severe depression, then this tiny story might not be for you.
That avoidance is a shame because it deprives Helen and us of the company of her one friend, being Christina. Now sometimes it’s a thankless task playing the side kick to a main character, but not only is Christina a bright spot in the flick, she’s also delightfully played by Irish actress Denise Hough. Denise is probably not a household name to most people, but she’s very much amazing to me because of her heroic work in the series Andor where she absolutely dominated a show with a lot of scenery chewing titans in it as the perfect embodiment of bureaucratic evil that is still self-aware enough to know how truly fucked things are in the Empire when you’ve enabled the genocide of a whole planet, aware of just how much you facilitated it all.
She was amazing in that streaming show, but here she’s still great, but her hardest task here is mastering an Australian accent, and caring about a friend who is dooming herself without coming across as controlling or self-involved. You don’t help a grieving friend by telling them to stop grieving (because you’re sick of hearing about it), or by uttering the least helpful words in the universe next to “have you tried relaxing / yoga / meditating?” or “you should smile more” are “maybe try not thinking about it so much”.
We don’t choose how much we think about something, that’s our blessing and our curse. We also don’t choose how guilty we might feel about not thinking about something, as if we’re annihilating the person we lost all over again. Yes, grief can be vast, but we only know how vast when we’re feeling it.
And we do silly, less than wise, self-harming things in the midst of overwhelming grief, but c’mon, it’s not like she started doing heroin, or fentanyl, or became a Christian or anything.
How far down she goes will probably strike some people as too far and not really that far (dramatically speaking), but it’s certainly enough to engender an amount of discomfort.
It should be discomforting to see someone pouring all their hopes and dreams on connecting to a bird, no matter how majestic, and despite how indifferent it might be to our intentions. Helen’s terror every time the bird flies off and she’s unsure of whether it’s coming back is still one we should be able to grasp.
Seeing her rendered mute, practically, around other humans, is meant to get us to feel some different emotions, as she gets further and further away.
When I say it’s a small film, I don’t mean that it’s limited to few locations or that it’s not ambitious in what it tries to encompass. There aren’t a lot of characters. Helen stifles herself, or feels stifled when trying to communicate, so there aren’t reams of dialogue or stacks of scenes between characters. For a lot of the flick it’s just her and the bird, and there’s not a lot of dialogue there (other than telling Mabel that she’s a “good girl” so often that it loses all meaning).
It’s certainly not an easy performance, or it couldn’t have been an easy performance for Claire Foy. To be able to do much of what she does here, since there’s no faking many of those scenes, she had to have practically learned to be a falconer herself. There are a stack of outdoor scenes, some of which have the quality of capturing flight the way we may have come to expect from Sir David Attenborough’s panoply of documentaries over the decade, and they’re just as sharp, even if they seem a bit cobbled together in the edit. Still, seeing Mabel swooping between and below branches at high speed can still be breathtaking.
I appreciate that, at least for me, the assured way the director, the screenplay and the central performances (not counting Mabel, who isn’t acting; she’s just being a bird / tiny flying dinosaur to the best of her abilities) come together craft an enjoyable and deeply felt movie that doesn’t resort to or rely on melodrama or cheap sentimentality. I still am not sure it works that well for anyone who didn’t read and love the book (anyone who hated the book surely wouldn’t watch the film, that would make no earthly sense).
H is for Hawk is a tribute to the author, to Nature itself, to the lovely bird, and to her dearly beloved dad all over again, and that makes it a worthy endeavour in my eyes.
8 times this was worthy of my time (if you read and liked the book), or 6 ways this flick is worthy of your time if you didn’t, or have never felt soul shattering grief in your life yet in which case I envy you out of 10
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“The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away. There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. My flight from death was on her barred and beating wings. But I had forgotten that the puzzle that was death was caught up in the hawk, and I was caught up in it too.” - H is for Hawk
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