Jason Day offers his thoughts about H is for Hawk, the movie about a woman (Claire Foy) who inherits a bird of prey while grieving for her father (Brendan Gleeson).

Jason

Synopsis

(From IMDb.com) After losing her beloved father, Helen finds herself saved by an unlikely friendship with a stubborn hawk named Mabel.

Review, by @Reelreviewer

This middle-class, ‘Waitrose wildlife’ version of Kes (1969), Ken Loach’s much-praised classic tale of a council estate teenage falconer, is set in the decidedly more privileged world of Cambridge academia.

Kes, with a largely non-professional cast, soared with beauty and resilience between the ‘ooh, it’s grim opp north’ bits. H is for Hawk manages to be more drab and depressing, despite great and well-known actors.

For a film about a woman connecting with wildlife to get over grief and find a renewed purpose in life, this was never going to be a production from the studio ‘Barrel of Larfs’. Admittedly, I have not read the book – by Helen Macdonald – so I can’t rightly compare and contrast, but some extra positivity could have been injected.

I love actress Foy and give her the thumbs up in just about everything she appears in (Unsane, 2018; The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, 2021; All of Us Strangers, 2023 and as Queen Elizabeth II in TV’s The Crown, 2016-2023), but this is a two-hour-long therapy session without glimmers of hope.

She does well for a ‘hard sell’ of a character, someone who is has all the advantages in life but still ‘struggles’ through one first world problem of the moment before the next. I understand her character/Macdonald went through a lot, but the film’s cold and cinematically unexciting approach (see below for my point about how they shoot Mabel in flight) and Foy’s frigid performance make it difficult to fully like her and appreciation her situation.

Her character has an offer of a job in Germany and needs to arrange moving home, something that represents her inertia. Her home goes to pot as caring for Mabel sucks her energy and housekeeping levels; eventually, she ends up losing everything in a vexing manner. We suspect it will happen, and then it does, but it’s all heavily implied rather than being properly tied up.

The great supporting cast includes Duncan as Foy’s concerned mother, Denise Gough as Foy’s sparky friend and particularly Gleeson, who twinkles delightfully as Foy’s late, beloved father, the real-life, noted photojournalist Alasdair Macdonald.

There are brief moments of spectacular cinematography of Mabel in flight, swooping through bracken and branches, that must have taken ages to set up and capture at the right moment. This must explain why there is so little of this, but as Mabel is the co-lead and this film’s USP (it’s only USP, you could argue), you’d think more time would be spent on making the film as much about her as it is about Foy.

According to Foy, during a recent episode of The Graham Norton Show, one of the producers bought two Goshawk eggs that were hatched a year before production. This is news that got my ‘ethics radar’ pinging on overtime…I thought, “Is such a cavalier approach to avian husbandry allowed?”

Perhaps all the right steps were taken, but there’s a lot of regulation involved with raising and caring for such a species. I’m dwelling on things that, in the grand scheme of cinema, are worth a ponder but probably don’t matter that much, rather like H is for Hawk itself.

See the official H is for Hawk trailer.

Cast & credits

Director: Philippa Lowthorpe. 1hr 59mins/119 min. Calculus Media/City Hill Arts/DESMAR/Film4/Good Gate Media/Plan B Entertainment/Saturnia/Lionsgate. (12a).

Producers: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner.
Writers: Emma Donoghue, Philippa Lowthorpe.
Camera: Charlotte Bruus Christensen.
Music: Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch.
Sets: Sarah Finlay.

Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, Emma Cunniffe, Lindsay Duncan, Josh Dylan, Denise Gough, Arty Froushan, Sam Spruell, Eden Hamilton.