{"id":188921,"date":"2025-08-31T07:01:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-31T07:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/188921\/"},"modified":"2025-08-31T07:01:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-31T07:01:09","slug":"claire-foy-leads-sensitive-if-slow-grief-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/188921\/","title":{"rendered":"Claire Foy Leads Sensitive if Slow Grief Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tHelen (Claire Foy<\/a>) is not the kind of woman to wallow in her emotions. After her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson<\/a>) passes, she insists she\u2019s not moping (\u201cDad would hate any kind of moping\u201d); when loved ones ask if she\u2019s okay, she dismisses their concerns and tells them she\u2019s just fine.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut a grief as large as Helen\u2019s does not simply disappear because it\u2019s denied language or tears. It simply finds other methods of expression. A few months after her dad\u2019s death, Helen adopts a goshawk, one of the birds of prey she and he so used to love spotting on their bird watching expeditions, and immediately makes it her whole world.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tH Is for Hawk\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tA sensitive but slow portrayal of grief.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue:<\/strong> Telluride Film Festival
Cast:<\/strong> Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, Denise Gough, Sam Spruell, Emma Cunniffe, Josh Dylan, Arty Froushan, Lindsay Duncan
Director:<\/strong> Philippa Lowthorpe
Screenwriters:<\/strong> Emma Donoghue and Philippa Lowthorpe, based on the book by Helen Macdonald
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t2 hours 8 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tH Is for Hawk, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and co-written by Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue<\/a> based on Helen Macdonald\u2019s memoir of the same title, is the tale of that rather unusual coping mechanism. As an appreciation of birds and our connection to them, it\u2019s engrossing and endearing \u2014 a fresher take, certainly, than yet another weepie about dog or cat owners. But as an exploration of grief, it\u2019s hindered by a 128-minute run time that spreads its emotional potency too thin.<\/p>\n

\n\tInitially, Helen seems to be handling the death of her father, the photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, as well as might reasonably be expected of anyone who\u2019s just lost what she calls \u201cthe only person in the world who truly understood me.\u201d She carries on with her teaching fellowship at Cambridge University, and makes plans to apply for a prestigious new job. She hangs out with her best friend, Christina (Denise Gough<\/a>, here as likable as her Andor character is despicable). She even starts dating a handsome art dealer, Amar (Arty Froushan), whom she\u2019s met on Twitter. (H Is for Hawk takes place in 2007, making them very early adopters.)<\/p>\n

\n\tBut once Amar leaves, she falls apart, though the breakup seems less the cause of her breakdown than the proverbial straw that broke the camel\u2019s back. It\u2019s at this point that she decides to buy Mabel, the goshawk, and falls head over heels in love at first sight. To Helen, Mabel is no mere distraction, nor a pet, nor a hobby \u2014 Mabel is her hunting partner, as she\u2019ll snap to anyone who dares invoke any of those other words.<\/p>\n

\n\tEspecially at first, H Is for Hawk might seem a strong argument for taking up falconry. Mabel, or rather the trained bird actors who play her, is a delightfully magnetic presence on camera, with her wide alert eyes, her handsome feathers and her fascinatingly inhuman movements. DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen captures both Mabel herself and the gorgeousness of the forests and fields that she takes as her hunting grounds with a real sense of reverence. If anything, it\u2019s harder to understand why others \u2014 like Stu (Sam Spruell), a friend and fellow falconer \u2014 had warned Helen against getting a goshawk in the first place, given that Mabel seems generally well-behaved for a wild predator.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the grief seeps through. The script, by Lowthorpe and Donoghue, is particularly well-observed when it comes to the almost comical oddness of mourning. In one scene, Helen tells a restaurant server her father has just died, and he returns with a plate piled high with desserts as if unsure what else to do. In another, Helen and her brother, James (Josh Dylan), choke back giggles over the funeral director\u2019s somber question of whether they might want a \u201cthemed\u201d coffin decorated in ridiculously tacky nature designs.<\/p>\n

\n\tFoy, who previously worked with Lowthorpe on Netflix\u2019s The Crown<\/a>, does an excellent job of capturing Helen\u2019s stiff-upper-lip repression, with gestures as small as the way she brushes away the tears that occasionally leak through \u2014 as if they\u2019re mere physical annoyances rather than reflections of inner turmoil.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe more Helen becomes fixated on Mabel, the more she seems to dim in every other aspect of her life. She flakes on her job, ignores questions about her future, distances herself from her friends and family. On rare occasions when she\u2019s forced to leave the house for non-Mabel reasons, she might bring Mabel with her \u2014 leading to the funny-sad sight of partygoers giving this woman with a bird a very wide berth \u2014 or else grit her teeth through an unbearable cacophony of mindless chatter and grating music.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a sensitive portrayal of a person\u2019s slide into depression. The issue is that H Is for Hawk mistakes \u201cgradual\u201d for \u201cslow.\u201d The film feels baggy with a few too many repetitions of scenes or ideas we\u2019ve seen already, making it hard for the film\u2019s emotions to pick up the momentum they need; a tighter edit might have distilled those feelings down to a more powerful form.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut then, the patience required is in keeping with Helen and her father\u2019s favorite hobby. \u201cWatch carefully so you remember what you\u2019ve seen,\u201d he tells her as they search the skies with their binoculars for interesting birds. Flashbacks to their happier days are interspersed throughout the film, triggered by details as small as the scrape on his arm that never had time to heal, or the seating arrangement in a car she\u2019s inherited from him. Helen\u2019s adoration for her dad casts him in a nearly angelic glow, frequently backlit by a bright white sun that might be beaming from the gates of Heaven themselves. But Gleeson\u2019s relaxed performance nevertheless ensures he feels like a human being, rather than some sentimental symbol of parental perfection.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe symbolism, instead, is left up to the bird. Mabel might be Helen\u2019s dad, or Helen\u2019s grief, or Helen herself; she\u2019s a reminder that death comes for us all, or that nature is full of beautiful and awe-inspiring things. I found myself wondering what Mabel herself would make of all this messy human emotion. Then I caught myself, realizing I too was probably projecting too much of myself onto a bird who never asked to be here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Helen (Claire Foy) is not the kind of woman to wallow in her emotions. After her beloved father…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":188922,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[104633,104634,105733,171,53,104192,104282,104193,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-188921","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-brendan-gleeson","9":"tag-claire-foy","10":"tag-emma-donoghue","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-telluride","14":"tag-telluride-2025","15":"tag-telluride-film-festival","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115122096476848980","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}