H Is for Hawk Review: Claire Foy Triumphs

H Is for Hawk, Philippa Lowthorpe’s beautifully adapted meditation on grief, father/daughter relationships and birdwatching, soars – pun intended.

Helen Macdonald (Claire Foy, of All Of Us Strangers) has a good, peaceful life. She’s a Cambridge professor, with a boyfriend she met on the earnest, spirited debate side of Twitter (remember when that was a thing?) and plans to apply for a fellowship abroad. One day, her father, Alisdair (Brendan Gleeson, of The Banshees of Inisherin), passes away, and Helen, who calls Alisdair the only person in the world who truly understood her, finds her life suddenly in freefall.

Searching for a new sense of purpose, she returns to her passion for birdwatching and training, which Alisdair helped inculcate in her. She scours the internet and travels to meet with a breeder, who sells her a goshawk she names Mabel. Helen then sets to training her, leaving her claustrophobic university life for hours at a time to retreat into expansive, isolated forests. Training a bird of prey, as audiences will learn, is no easy feat: first, the trainer must prove themself trustworthy, and then they can start working with their bird to eat, fly, and eventually hunt across large distances. As weeks pass, Helen subsumes her grief into her project, sinking into a deep depression only Mabel is able to help with.

H Is for Hawk weaves together spiderwebs of memory as it switches between past and present, making the parallels between Helen’s work with Mabel and her memories of her father clear but never overly obvious. While the film includes multiple scenes of the two birdwatching, the scenes that feel most real are the ones with no birds at all. 

Throughout the film we see young Helen accompanying Alisdair, who was a renowned photojournalist, on his project to photograph every bridge across the Thames. This is an odyssey that Helen only comes to understand in adulthood: the journey matters more than the destination, and good things take time. One of the film’s strengths is the way each flashback shows but does not tell, allowing us to appreciate Helen and Alisdair’s gentle, earnest moments together without suffocating us in pointed life lessons. By including elements of their relationship beyond birding, Helen and Alisdair come to feel like rich, multifaceted characters. It’s as though the film, too, understood that it is the journey that matters, not the destination, allowing us to draw these conclusions as we reflect on our own lives.

H Is for Hawk finds beauty in juxtaposition. The tenderness that comes from Helen feeding Mabel chunks of raw meat. The humor found in dark places, like the scene where Helen and her brother are in a church planning Alisdair’s funeral, unable to contain their laughter as they are solemnly asked whether they are interested in a horrendously tacky “themed” coffin. These moments of humor are bright and unexpected, and often have some kind of true emotional payoff. 

From the hypnotic bird closeups that show each individual shining feather to the sun filtered through clouds of cigarette smoke, cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen captures Helen’s emotions as connected to her environment. The dirty plates and half-read books that fill the house are filmed from a sterile distance and lit by gray winter light, while Helen’s joyous scenes with Mabel are often filmed in closeup with a single golden light source illuminating them. The cinematography is visually interesting and expertly connects us to Helen’s emotional journey.

Claire Foy’s performance in H Is for Hawk elevates a story about grief that we have, admittedly, seen before. She portrays all of Helen’s nuances and neuroses, a complex person with a life and problems outside of her grief. She is headstrong and hates asking for help, even from her friends and family. As she and Mabel begin to bond, she walks through the streets with the bird on her arm, holding her head high when she receives odd looks, though her occasional lip wobbles reveal secret embarrassment. With shaky hands, she swipes at her eyes before tears can fall, and her mouth drops open in awe as Mabel takes flight. 

In addition to carefully depicting grief and depression, Foy must act opposite the goshawk, an intimidating feat that lends authenticity to the performance; the relationship between actress and bird feels incredibly real, and one can’t help but be impressed by the skills Foy must have learned for the film. Foy’s restrained and tender performance takes the movie to the next level.

While I generally loved the film’s pacing, calm and natural as it takes us through the months, the abrupt ending that offers a limited sense of the future took me by surprise. The many long shots of Mabel soaring through the forest make it clear that those involved in the film leaned into the animal angle that may set it aside from other dramas about a similar subject.

For the most part, the film remains grounded in Helen’s journey, resisting the desire to wring as much out of their animal budget as it could have. It’s notable restraint in a genre that can be so focused on the animal star that it sacrifices humanity. But still, I wish the ending had been more fleshed out, even if it meant leaving out some of those striking aerial shots. By sacrificing this well-rounded ending, the film focuses more on grief than on healing, which is cathartic but also frustrating. 

Overall, H Is for Hawk offers a beautiful grief journey and character portrait that tugged at my heartstrings and prompted me to call my loved ones.

H Is for Hawk will have a limited theatrical run in the U.S. from December 19, 2025 and will be released in theaters nationwide on January 23, 2026.