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Claire Foy, who plays Helen in new movie H is for Hawk, trained with goshawks for two weeks before filming, and throughout the seven-week shoot.The Associated Press
S is for Stern. That’s the word that kept coming to mind as I watched the gorgeous film adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s bestselling memoir H Is for Hawk, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, written by Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue.
Helen, played by Claire Foy (The Crown, Women Talking) – stripped-down, raw, utterly perfect – lectures on the history of science at the University of Cambridge. A bit flinty, she has friends and occasional lovers, but her father Alisdair (Brendan Gleeson), a news photographer, is her person. When he drops dead, she falls into a grief made of steel and burrs, and only something equally steely and spiky can keep her going.
Enter Mabel, a goshawk. Humans have hunted with the majestic birds for 4,000 years, but the relationship remains wary. A bird expert in the film calls goshawks “the wildest and maddest of raptors … perfectly evolved psychopaths.” The pinfeathers around their eyes catch the blood that spatters as they eat their prey. In other words, the grief companion Helen chooses – the kind of love she needs – is a stern one. The name Mabel may mean “loveable,” but she’s the furthest thing possible from a cuddly puppy.
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The death of Helen’s father Alisdair, played by Brendan Gleeson, sends her into a spiral of grief.The Associated Press
“Helen needed to become something else,” Foy, who is 41, told me in a recent video interview, her intelligence shimmering through the screen. “Mabel represented disconnection, a way of rising above the human concerns of connection, love, loss. Mabel could choose to leave at any time when Helen is flying her free. Walking that tightrope is what love is. That’s the risk you take. That’s what Mabel embodied. Through her ferocious natural way of being, she opened Helen to love in a deep and profound way.”
For chunks of the film, Helen and Mabel are alone, but those scenes are the most alive: Mabel flapping on Helen’s arm, learning to return on command, and eventually hunting. Foy trained with the goshawks for two weeks before filming, and throughout the seven-week shoot. Thrilling drone shots capture amazing moments of them zipping through tiny gaps between trees or zooming low to the ground, tall grasses whipping their wings.
“I wrote it as similar to a mother and baby,” Donoghue, the Irish-Canadian novelist and screenwriter (Room), said in a separate interview. “I was creating this intense little dyad of Helen and Mabel. But you can’t get a hawk to act. You can’t train it to please you. They don’t want to please you, they want to hunt. So the hunting had to be done for real.”
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For those scenes, Donoghue wrote all sorts of microscopic, specific beats: exciting moments, worrying moments, Helen scrabbling through trees, getting slashed in the face, blood on her forehead. She knew the filmmakers would capture other footage, too, and it would be shaped by the edit, “but establishing the rhythm was important,” she continues. “By writing vivid, specific moments, you give the filmmakers ideas for the kinds of things that are necessary. It’s not just, ‘Helen and Mabel go for a walk.’ It’s a whole vocabulary of flight and action.”
Mabel is played by several different goshawks, by the way. Though the film was stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic, its producer Dede Gardner was so committed to it, she bought six baby chicks during the downtime, so they’d be grown and trained by the time the cameras rolled. In England, a goshawk costs around £850, or $1,500 Canadian. They can live up to 19 years in captivity.
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Helen, right, and her mother, played by Lindsay Duncan.The Associated Press
The elements in the book that gripped readers around the world come alive anew in the film. One, it’s a fresh take on the human/animal relationship. In a conventional animal story, “it’s very often one boy, standing in for the human race, interacting with an animal that dies, to show innocence destroyed,” Donoghue says. “This is not that. It’s fresher, more subtle and nuanced. Mabel shapes Helen as Helen is shaping Mabel. There are so many interesting parallels between grief and the hawk, Helen and the hawk, the hawk as death, but as life as well.”
Goshawks are classified as a “non-affectionate species,” and that captivated Donoghue, too, in our age of people “forming what they perceive as relationships with chatbots,” she says. “In all our connections, there’s an element of making it up – whether it’s a goldfish, human or AI girlfriend.” Since she signed on to H is for Hawk back in 2016, her fascination with birds has only grown: Her 2022 novel Haven, set on a medieval Irish island, “has non-stop birds in it,” and she’s currently working on one about pigeons.
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Mabel is played by several different goshawks in the film, which was stalled by the pandemic. The movie’s producer bought six baby chicks during the downtime so they’d be grown and trained by the time they were ready to film.The Associated Press
In one of the film’s telling scenes, as Helen introduces her young niece to Mabel, the hawk spits out a casting, a pellet made of fur, feathers, and claw and bone fragments, parts of a kill that she’s eaten but won’t digest. “You’re very lucky you got to see that,” Helen says – and she means it. And we are. It’s bracing to see the truth, however unappetizing.
Helen, too, is spitting out what she doesn’t need, and that’s this story’s other great pull: In the course of our human lives, every single one of us will grieve. It’s universal, yet Western culture remains utterly bewildered by it. Watching Helen go through it, with her intense cleverness, wealth of knowledge and yes, sternness, ends up being uplifting without a trace of saccharine.
Author Helen Macdonald on the hawk that kept her grounded
“Grief is not predictable or simple,” Donoghue says. “There are moments of incongruous laughter, moments where you can’t feel on demand. The stages of grief were never meant to be sequential; they were meant to be the varied phenomena of grief. When Helen gets obsessed with Mabel, she seems to turn away from the business of grieving her dad. But of course she’s working through what’s she’s lost – it’s just not the most direct route. It’s like Alice Through the Looking Glass: to get to the hill, you must turn away from the hill.”
Foy agrees: “The more conversations we can have about the inevitable, and bring things out in the open in a way that’s full of love, will hopefully make people feel less alone.”
The works of art that have the biggest impact, she continues, are those in which “people are willing to be really honest – really honest – about who they are and what they’ve experienced. That connects people more than attempts to be universal. ‘Look what this person did when they were grieving; it’s significant, rare and profound.’ In my work, I’m interested in that kind of truth. The older I get, the less I’m able to be phony.” Y is for Yes yes yes yes yes.
