Claire Foy Leads Delicate if Sluggish Grief Drama

Helen (Claire Foy) isn’t the sort of lady to wallow in her feelings. After her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson) passes, she insists she’s not moping (“Dad would hate any sort of moping”); when family members ask if she’s okay, she dismisses their considerations and tells them she’s simply superb.

However a grief as massive as Helen’s doesn’t merely disappear as a result of it’s denied language or tears. It merely finds different strategies of expression. A couple of months after her dad’s loss of life, Helen adopts a goshawk, one of many birds of prey she and he so used to like recognizing on their fowl watching expeditions, and instantly makes it her entire world.

H Is for Hawk, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and co-written by Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue primarily based on Helen Macdonald’s memoir of the identical title, is the story of that moderately uncommon coping mechanism. As an appreciation of birds and our connection to them, it’s engrossing and endearing — a brisker take, definitely, than yet one more weepie about canine or cat homeowners. However as an exploration of grief, it’s hindered by a 128-minute run time that spreads its emotional efficiency too skinny.

Initially, Helen appears to be dealing with the loss of life of her father, the photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, in addition to may fairly be anticipated of anybody who’s simply misplaced what she calls “the one particular person on this planet who really understood me.” She carries on together with her educating fellowship at Cambridge College, and makes plans to use for a prestigious new job. She hangs out together with her finest buddy, Christina (Denise Gough, right here as likable as her Andor character is despicable). She even begins relationship a good-looking artwork supplier, Amar (Arty Froushan), whom she’s met on Twitter. (H Is for Hawk takes place in 2007, making them very early adopters.)

However as soon as Amar leaves, she falls aside, although the breakup appears much less the reason for her breakdown than the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s again. It’s at this level that she decides to purchase Mabel, the goshawk, and falls head over heels in love at first sight. To Helen, Mabel isn’t any mere distraction, nor a pet, nor a passion — Mabel is her looking accomplice, as she’ll snap to anybody who dares invoke any of these different phrases.

Particularly at first, H Is for Hawk may appear a robust argument for taking over falconry. Mabel, or moderately the educated fowl actors who play her, is a delightfully magnetic presence on digicam, together with her vast alert eyes, her good-looking feathers and her fascinatingly inhuman actions. DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen captures each Mabel herself and the gorgeousness of the forests and fields that she takes as her looking grounds with an actual sense of reverence. If something, it’s tougher to grasp why others — like Stu (Sam Spruell), a buddy and fellow falconer — had warned Helen towards getting a goshawk within the first place, provided that Mabel appears usually well-behaved for a wild predator.

However the grief seeps by way of. The script, by Lowthorpe and Donoghue, is especially well-observed in relation to the just about comical oddness of mourning. In a single scene, Helen tells a restaurant server her father has simply died, and he returns with a plate piled excessive with desserts as if not sure what else to do. In one other, Helen and her brother, James (Josh Dylan), choke again giggles over the funeral director’s somber query of whether or not they may need a “themed” coffin embellished in ridiculously cheesy nature designs.

Foy, who beforehand labored with Lowthorpe on Netflix’s The Crown, does a superb job of capturing Helen’s stiff-upper-lip repression, with gestures as small as the way in which she brushes away the tears that often leak by way of — as in the event that they’re mere bodily annoyances moderately than reflections of interior turmoil.

The extra Helen turns into fixated on Mabel, the extra she appears to dim in each different facet of her life. She flakes on her job, ignores questions on her future, distances herself from her family and friends. On uncommon events when she’s pressured to go away the home for non-Mabel causes, she may carry Mabel together with her — resulting in the funny-sad sight of partygoers giving this lady with a fowl a really vast berth — or else grit her tooth by way of an insufferable cacophony of senseless chatter and grating music.

It’s a delicate portrayal of an individual’s slide into melancholy. The difficulty is that H Is for Hawk errors “gradual” for “gradual.” The movie feels dishevelled with just a few too many repetitions of scenes or concepts we’ve seen already, making it arduous for the movie’s feelings to select up the momentum they want; a tighter edit may need distilled these emotions right down to a extra highly effective kind.

However then, the persistence required is consistent with Helen and her father’s favourite passion. “Watch fastidiously so that you bear in mind what you’ve seen,” he tells her as they search the skies with their binoculars for fascinating birds. Flashbacks to their happier days are interspersed all through the movie, triggered by particulars as small because the scrape on his arm that by no means had time to heal, or the seating association in a automobile she’s inherited from him. Helen’s adoration for her dad casts him in an almost angelic glow, regularly backlit by a vibrant white solar that could be beaming from the gates of Heaven themselves. However Gleeson’s relaxed efficiency nonetheless ensures he appears like a human being, moderately than some sentimental image of parental perfection.

The symbolism, as a substitute, is left as much as the fowl. Mabel could be Helen’s dad, or Helen’s grief, or Helen herself; she’s a reminder that loss of life comes for us all, or that nature is filled with lovely and awe-inspiring issues. I discovered myself questioning what Mabel herself would make of all this messy human emotion. Then I caught myself, realizing I too was most likely projecting an excessive amount of of myself onto a fowl who by no means requested to be right here.