Sunday 12 April 2026, 3:30 pm
Rainbow Cinemas, Northumberland Mall
Synopsis
When Helen's beloved father passes away, she is knocked sideways by grief and loses herself in memories of their time birding and exploring the natural world together. She becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk, and so she brings the fearsome bird Mabel home to her life as a graduate fellow at Cambridge. Helen fills the freezer with hawk food and turns off her phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals. But as she labours to tame Mabel, a grieving Helen undergoes an untaming of her own. A record of a spiritual journey, H IS FOR HAWK is a story about memory and nature and how it might be possible to reconcile death with life and love.
Director: Philippa Lowthorpe
Cast: Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, Denise Gough
Genre: Drama
Run time: 1 hour 55 minutes
Language: English
Rating: PG-13 for themes of grief and sadness, strong language
Awards: Claire Foy won the Golden Eye Award for her body of work at the Zurich Film Festival
Review
By Tom Meek
Grief, depression and goshawks may sound somber, but an outstanding, and deeply internal, lead performance by Claire Foy (“Women Talking,” “The Crown”) makes this film a reflective contemplation on navigating life’s complexities.
Based on Helen Macdonald’s memoir, the film hones in on Helen in the late aughts during her time as a research fellow at Jesus College — part of Cambridge University — and just after the death of her father, Alisdair MacDonald (played in flashbacks by Brendan Gleeson).“Ali Mac” was a renowned photographer in the ’60s and ’70s who embedded with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He also liked to shoot the natural world and imbued in Helen a deep love of nature. To power though her grief, Helen enlists a friend (a reflective Sam Spruell) with a passion for falconry to help her adopt a goshawk she names Mabel (after the writer and naturalist Mabel Osgood Wright). This being a quintessentially British film, not a feel-good Hollywood flick, adopting Mabel is not an unalloyed panacea – although the scenes of Mabel hunting are gorgeously framed and mesmerizing. The movie is competently directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, who worked with Foy on “The Crown,” and it’s amazing how seamlessly Foy and Lowthorpe can cast wonderment and setback as near-complementary experiences. It’s a bittersweet exploration of loneliness and self-doubt that soars on the strength of its restraint and Foy’s full embodiment of Helen’s emotional state.