Grief was a common theme in last year’s cinematic slate, particularly in films that tackle it from a unique angle, such as the animal familiar and how it connects with animals during the grieving period. The most recent one that comes to mind is The Thing with Feathers by Dylan Southern, a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to walk the fine line between animal-tamer and grief-griever. H Is for Hawk is one such film. The feature is based on Helen McDonald’s novel of the same name and directed by 3-time BAFTA winner Philippa Lawthorpe, a veteran director totally in command of her craft.
It stars the ever-brilliant Claire Foy as Helen, who, while processing the grief of losing her father, buys a goshawk, and that’s what gets her journey of discovering herself while opening herself up for grieving her dead father, the one she has bonded with immensely and whose loss affected her more than she likes to show. Helen is a mess. She has a knack for Apache songs, she smokes, hates her academic job at Cambridge, and doesn’t have much luck with dating. It seems though that she has been struggling pre-grief, so it’s not necessarily a new emerging chaos that befalls her after her dad dies. More of a reason for her to evaluate how her life has been stagnant all those years.
The film picks up the pace when Helen buys the goshawk and starts bonding with it. The beginning of their friendship is when grief begins to fade from the equation, which makes one wonder about the necessity for the longer scenes in the film’s first act with Helen trying to come to terms with grief in her dull life. Foy is magnificent as a falconer. Beyond her connection to grief, it’s the chemistry she has with the hawk, Mabel, that makes the movie soar. Foy’s immersion and extensive training, make her scenes with Mabel fascinating to watch. And it makes up for all the boring moments at the beginning of the film that failed to peak my interest in Helen or her struggles.
Kudos to DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen for the great hawk closeups, and the intense sequences of hunting and training. She creates an intense framework of man vs. nature within a fast-paced, adrenaline-fueling environment that places the viewer in the heart of Helen’s plight and resilience to make sense of the clutter that is her life through her mad, disruptive quest to raise Mabel and proof everyone wrong about her life and new obsession. As I find myself invested in the movie deep into the second half, I ask myself, What is it really about? Grief seems like the least interesting part of the film, we don’t get a lot of the dad to feel his absence from the screen (a brilliant Brendan Gleeson, but still) and Helen’s life seems like a plateau pre and posthumous. Then as the relationship between Mabel and Helen evolves and intertwines, I realize, it’s not a film about grief, but a journey of a woman to become the wild person she has always wanted to be. Helen is not meant for a steady date, and a secure, safe job. She’s not the good daughter, but more of her dad’s buddy as she grew up. She doesn’t get a tick next to any checkbox in terms of a good citizen in modern society. But she has never found the guts to let go of all that ties her down to be who she’s meant to be.
H Is for Hawk drives its potency from its animal familiar bonding. A woman coming to terms with grief seeks solace in taming a “beast” of a bird. Rather than getting a dog or rescuing a cat, she calms the monstrosity of her aching soul through falconry, too practical to admit that the moment she lost a father, is the moment of the grand realization of the meaninglessness of her life, and the moment she chooses a hawk to train and raise, becomes her access to an unexplored soulful kinship. The first, for Helen.