“H is for Hawk” (2025) adapts Helen Macdonald’s 2014 memoir about how they trained a Goshawk for a year after their father, Alisdair Macdonald, nicknamed Ali Mack, a British press photojournalist for the Daily Mirror and Today, died in 2007. Claire Foy plays Helen while they were a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, Jesus College, and Brendan Gleeson plays their father. The two engaged in many activities together, and their last conversation was about Helen spotting a pair of goshawks flying together. After his death, Helen tries to find their footing and decides that getting a goshawk is the way to get back on track but becomes more untethered from daily life. Will Helen accept that they are not coping?
People like easy stories and tend to treat death like an errand, something that gets squeezed in to fit a bust schedule but must be handled as quickly as possible to not disrupt routine. “H is for Hawk” may not have the audience needed to appreciate it. It is a story about a grief gutted human and a “perfectly evolved psychopath” wild animal that flies. The director and cowriter Philippa Lowthorpe and cowriter Emma Donoghue do their best to make an innately unwieldy story into something approachable and obey the most important rule of film, show and do not tell, but it may leave the audience as unmoored as the onscreen Helen. It is not easy to watch someone be grief stricken, paralyzed and overstimulated, but it is exactly what makes the story work. It feels as if the audience walked into the middle of a story that spanned generations and are trying to catch up but it is impossible. Perhaps if the filmmakers provided a smidge more context earlier, then it would be easier to follow.
The cast is superb, and if their depiction of the real-life characters is accurate, then “H is for Hawk” paints a world that is better than expected. Foy plays Helen in a counterintuitive way. She introduces Helen as confident in the way that they navigate the world whether in the city or the countryside even if they are being eccentric. Afterwards, they become more apologetic, quieter and stiller to train Mabel, the goshawk. Five birds played the role with Lloyd and Rose Buck behind-the scenes training and handling them. Instead of returning to normal society, this choice makes them more sensitive to the chaos of city life. They find themselves sharing more traits in common with Mabel. The pivotal scene is when they explain to their best friend, Christina (Denise Gough), how Mabel’s brain works: if she cannot see something, it does not exist. In human beings, this trait is considered a sign of neurodivergence. Even though Helen says that Mabel is not like “us,” Helen is actually like Mabel. They shut out the world, focuses on Mabel and their memories of their father and winds up forgetting to interact with the human world: family, friends and job. The film has numerous flashbacks, which in the present is reflected with Helen noticeably disassociating from her surroundings.
“H is for Hawk” does not explicitly state that Helen has ADHD, but the film depicts how it swallows everything though a moviegoer unfamiliar with the neurotype may just reduce it to the loss of a loved one. It would be interesting to know whether they were diagnosed before or after Ali’s death because while watching the movie, it feels as if they would discover the diagnosis after their father’s death because any condition can get exacerbated under stress and other mental health conditions. Before Ali dies, the film starts showing Helen running late to meet Christina for dinner before anything is wrong. There is so much going on such as different types of loss and transition like job security and housing. They bargain with deadlines and cannot write the eulogy because of a lecture and cannot move because of the eulogy and memorial service preparations. They could even be AuDHD (Autism and ADHD) (compliment) when they become sensitive to external stimuli and only feel peace in the countryside. Mabel becomes a cover story for not wanting to interact with people.
Helen is like her dad, who is shown as a rule breaker who does things according to his own time in his own way. Gleeson is a gentle giant of an actor but imagine cordoning off an area then seeing him bust through it. Ali is all golden retriever, but what people find delightful in him is reframed and disapproved when Helen behaves similarly. Her family, Mum (Lindsay Duncan) and brother, James (Josh Dylan), are supportive and rightfully concerned, but they cannot hide their revulsion and disgust over her new hobby, one that is her father’s living legacy, and the way that Helen keeps house.
Helen is AFAB but nonbinary, which is never articulated explicitly in the film, but costume designer Amy Roberts reflects it in her styling choices for Helen. Women are expected to act a certain way, but Helen cannot perform femininity before the mask slips. As a means of coping, she wants to hide behind that mask. There is one scene where a date goes wrong at the end. If Helen was not AFAB, a date of the opposite presenting sex would see Helen’s gesture as romantic and her reading pastimes as signs of being healthy and working on oneself.
In contrast, Christina, Stuart (Sam Spruell) and his wife, Mandy (Emma Cunniffe) are people who accept Helen, openly express their concern and/or disapproval. In addition, Helen’s coworkers are shockingly more accepting of Helen breaking overt rules and include Mabel in events without seeming disturbed in the slightest that they are close to a killing machine. Moviegoers, fear not. The goshawk does not attack any human being.
The goshawk does attack other living beings however and in one training scene, it appears that it is killing a chick! Yes, maybe it should occur to a potential ticket buyer that “H is for Hawk” may involve animals dying, but if it does not, consider yourself warned. The goshawk is beautiful, but after Helen warns people not to look directly at it then keeps doing so or waving her hand near it, it was like waiting for the other shoe to drop and distracted from the entire plot. Your head will be screaming, “Do not do that! Be careful! What are you doing?” Even though five birds play Mabel, and they are not acting, the filmmakers do craft a little storyline from the footage where Mabel clearly digs Christina in two separate scenes. In one scene, she is like, “Girl dinner” and starts eating. It is too cute. In another, Christina is waiting to be let in, and Helen is not even a little interested in answering then Mabel seems to be saying, “Hey, let our girl in. Are you ok?!? Are you my prey now? Should I eat you?” Are all these musings anthropomorphic projecting nonsense? Sure, but will you be thinking it too? Likely.
“H is for Hawk” improves with repeat viewings, but if people do not have the patience for uncomfortable situations and emotions in their own life, why would they pay for the experience? If you are an emotionally mature viewer interested in countercultural narratives that tackle the complexity of life and willing to forsake conventional cues of how people should act or the direction that a story should go, then give this film a chance.
