Film review of H Is for Hawk (12A) released on 23rd January 2026
If there’s any justice at the Oscars in March, the Best Actor Award will go to the goshawk in H Is for Hawk.
The goshawk looks magnificent in her cream and brown plumage, set off by her bright yellow, still, staring eyes. She’s terrific in action scenes, as she races, inches off the ground, in lethal pursuit of rabbits and pheasants.
She is a natural actor, too, as she’s patiently taught to fly by the equally convincing Claire Foy. Foy plays Helen Macdonald, the Cambridge don and author of the bestselling 2014 memoir H Is for Hawk, about how training her hawk, Mabel, helped her grieve her father’s death.
The problem with Mabel – and the film – is that goshawks aren’t great at dialogue. The goshawk would have been a shoo-in for Best Actress in the days of silent movies.
Because Mabel can’t talk, there are too many dialogue-free scenes, with poor Helen, looking deeply miserable, trying to get her to eat and fly.
In the moving book, these scenes are stirring because Macdonald is such a good writer.
She explains hawk-feeding so well – particularly the need to keep a hawk underweight, so it’s a hungry, ruthless hunter – that you’re gripped.
But, in the film, you see Mabel repeatedly being weighed and refusing to eat, in overlong shots, without being properly told why it matters.
Professor Julia Thomas, of Cardiff University, has just written an intriguing article about why films of books rarely match up to the original book.
Reading, she says, tends to elicit your own mental images, tailored to your own life. A film will rarely match up to those idiosyncratic images.
It’s also true that films are bad at recreating inner thoughts. You can write down your thoughts – in Macdonald’s case, thoughts of intense grief and longing for her father, combined with thoughts of hawk husbandry. And it’s convincing in turn for someone else to read them.
But it’s impossible to act out those inner thoughts on screen and deliver the same degree of exposition.
The only solution came in the Granada TV version of Brideshead Revisited (1981). Jeremy Irons read out great long passages by Evelyn Waugh to reveal Charles Ryder’s inner monologue.
So H Is for Hawk is a slow mover – to begin with. But it’s also well-acted, not least by Brendan Gleeson. He’s touching as Alisdair Macdonald (1940-2007), the Daily Mirror photographer who taught his daughter, Helen, the benefits of watching – he through a viewfinder, she at the end of a leash, as she stares for hours at Mabel, gauging her mood.
And so, about half an hour into the 115-minute film, you begin to be rewarded for putting up with the early boredom. You’re so affected by Helen’s grief for her sympathetic father – and how she becomes semi-feral in her attachment to Mabel and detachment from humans – that you long for her to succeed in teaching Mabel to fly.
And you’re genuinely thrilled by the hunting scenes, as Mabel becomes a fully-fledged killer, jinking through brambles and blackthorn, tucking in her wings to slip through the tiniest gap in the undergrowth.
Philippa Lowthorpe, co-writer (along with Macdonald and Emma Donoghue) and director, should in theory be praised for not Hollywoodising the book.
The film pretty much follows the book, with some minor changes and none of the passages about T H White, the Arthurian novelist and author of The Goshawk (1951), a book about his own goshawk-training.
But in fact the film could have
done with a bit more of the Hollywood touch; more of the ‘ahhh’ factor
when Mabel finally takes off and Macdonald recovers, at least partially, from her loss.
Professor Julia Thomas won’t be surprised to hear that the really good book is better than this pretty good film.
Available now on Radio Oldie: Charlotte Metcalf interviews Helen Macdonald.
