Rent H Is for Hawk (2025)

Grief With Talons - H Is for Hawk review by griggs

Grief does strange things to people. For Helen Macdonald, it meant acquiring a goshawk — one of nature’s more terrifying birds — and spending months in muddy fields trying to build trust with a creature that has no interest in being domesticated. H is for Hawk captures the obsessive pull of falconry with uncomfortable closeness, and doesn’t flinch from how ugly grief looks when you stop performing it for others.

Claire Foy is the reason to watch — and, for those who know, hello Claire Foy’s dad. She’s one of those actors I’ve struggled to see past the roles — The Crown casts a long shadow — but here she inhabits Macdonald’s exhausted, compulsive grief with an intensity that finally separates Foy from her characters. The supporting cast gets frustratingly little to do, the landscape occasionally tips into English Heritage prettiness, and the scenes with other humans never quite match the human-hawk material.

Moving, beautifully made, and a little incomplete. It skims where it should dig, but Foy gives it real weight — and the hawk, frankly, knows exactly what sort of film it’s in.

Irritating, Self-Pitying Film About Grief Based on a Bestselling Memoir, aimed at a female audience. - H Is for Hawk review by PV

The book H IS FOR HAWK became one of those surprise cult hits, selling millions mostly, it has to be said, to women (80% fiction readers are women anyway, and emotional memoirs mostly read by female readers too, as in THE SALT PATH, however fake). Maybe that is why this male viewer hated it.

I liked the hawk, and the scenes of it. However, my eyes rolled hard and often at the very self-pitying academic - who is so NO FILTER & rude to men in a way no male academic could be to women without getting suspended. She is an adult, around 30 years old. Her parents are in their 60s. No spoilers, but guess what? Older people die and most bury their parents, as have I.

So I felt the main character was rather wallowing in self-pity, and needed a good dose of Stoicism maybe. Having read this was a novel/film on grief I assumed it would be something unexpected and unbearably awful. Nope. These things happen.

There are lots of pity party misery memoirs about grief and bereavement (and illness and abuse etc). I dislike the genre to be honest.

Poetry is more suited to grief, collections such as THE LOVED ONES or fiction such as GRIEF IS A THING WITH FEATHERS. A SINGLE MAN (2009) is a wonderful film about grief and coping after someone dies, and mercifully free of the gushing self-pity on display here. GHOST and TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY rode a grief-wave in 1990. MANCHESTER BY SEA (2016) if often cited as the best movie about grief (for children, which I understand is devastating, especially these days, where deaths of parents and grandparents is not - that is just natural). If you want an original and spooky take, I loved MIDSOMMAR. THREE COLOURS: BLUE for the foreign language buffs is on the same grief theme.

Probably true to say this is a woman's genre and female viewers/readers will enjoy this in a way I cannot. One could call books/films like this 'emotional pornography' or emoporn - there's a need for it and TV drama/soaps satisfy that need mostly, and women's novels (romance, fantasy, memoir). Call me cynical and you'd be right!

2 stars. I found it deeply irritating actually.

Solid British Drama - H Is for Hawk review by GI

Claire Foy gives a very committed and genuine performance in this story, adapted from a true story, of a woman bereft and depressed following the sudden death of her father. It's a drama about grief and depression where Helen, a Cambridge history don, falls into despair when she loses her Dad, Alistair (Brendan Gleeson), a famous photographer. Their bond especially in relation to his love of nature, is so strong that Helen, with little else in her life, feels hopelessly lost. Her unusual solution is to buy a Goshawk and train it. Goshawk's are apparently notoriously difficult to train and extremely ruthless, the film presents the Hawk as quite malevolent at times! In her attempts to train and bond with the bird, which she names Mabel, Helen ignores everything else in her life much to the worry of her mother (Lindsay Duncan) and her best friend (Denise Gough). The film is grounded and watchable by seeing Foy interact with Mabel, you can see the genuine angst on her face when Mabel gets frisky or the joy when she response to her training. Overall though the film leaves the plight of Helen unresolved and perhaps that's a real symptom of such a life story, but it doesn't full grip the connection of the Hawk with her Dad even when Helen attempts to answer critical questions from her students on the relationship between a bird of prey and a human. It's a moving story though and is a solid addition to similar stories of humans navigating the trials of their lives by bonding with a wild animal.