H Is for Hawk Review: BFI London Film Festival 2025

A grieving woman channels her sadness into falconry in H Is for Hawk

H Is for Hawk left me slightly cold, but that is perhaps because of my own preconceived notion of what this story would be. I am a great believer in the healing power of nature, and on the surface of things you’d expect a story about a grieving woman building a relationship with a bird of prey to be about just that. But H Is for Hawk is just the opposite, an increasingly dark slide in to depression where what the central character needs is not to spend more time in nature or amongst animals. What she needs is serious psychiatric help.

Helen (Claire Foy) is a Cambridge university academic who shares a love of the natural world with her father Alaisdair (Brendan Gleeson) – a photojournalist for national newspapers. When Alaisdair heads off for a normal day of work and dies suddenly of a heart attack, Helen and her family are absolutely devastated. Distancing herself from friends and family and increasingly unable to focus at work, Helen’s comfortable life is soon crumbling.

Desperate for something to bring her joy again, Helen rekindles her childhood love of falconry. Rather than ease her way back into the hobby, she buys the most difficult bird of prey to train, an aggressive goshawk she names Mabel. Before long Helen is using Mabel as an excuse to withdraw even further from normal life – spending night and day out with her bird, forgetting to turn up to work at all, and hiding from her friends whenever they come round to check on her. It soon becomes clear that Helen isn’t just grieving, she’s spiralling into mental illness, and it’s uncertain if she can pull herself back out of it.

H Is for Hawk is strange but true story, based on an award winning 2014 memoir of the same name by Helen MacDonald. It’s directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, who previously worked with Foy on The Crown, she rounds out her cast with brilliant turns from Denise Gough, Lindsay Duncan, Josh Dylan and Sam Spruell.

The nature photography is simply stunning, including documentary-worthy shots that capture the sheer beauty of an apex predator up close. Serious props must be given to Foy, who must have done an extensive amount of prep and training to handle this large bird of prey so confidently and consistently throughout the movie – something tells me a goshawk is nowhere near so trainable as most animal co-stars. She balances all this animal handling with admirably intensive character work, depicting Helen’s descent into depression with heartbreaking authenticity.

Lowthorpe’s film feels quite strange in that is ascribes no character whatsoever to Mabel the hawk. As Helen herself says at one point ‘’they’re a non-affectionate species.’’ Yet the titular hawk isn’t just non-affectionate; she has no personality. This is probably much more accurate to nature than what we would normally see in stories, but as humans we can’t help but anthropomorphise animals. We build entire relationships with our pets based on our imagined ideas about how they think and feel – so for the central animal in this story to feel like almost a prop is an alien and slightly jarring concept that makes Helen’s story hard to relate to.

H Is for Hawk is a touching film about grief, mental illness and ultimately, healing; though it’s narrative framing makes what should be a universal experience feel slightly distant and cold – though we all know someone who’s acted strangely due to grief, it probably wasn’t ‘carry a 2kg bird everywhere with you for a year’ level of strange. Powered by another very strong central performance by Claire Foy, it contrasts its desperate sadness against gorgeous images of nature and beautiful animals. It’s not something I’d be in a hurry to rewatch, but as a twitcher myself, there was still plenty to admire here.

H Is for Hawk is playing as part of the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in UK cinemas in January 2026

Check out more reviews from the 2025 London Film Festival here