The room is full of people, but Helen is alone. You can hear the voices of a party around her, and sometimes you can even see them, but Helen (Claire Foy) isn’t interacting with any of them. She stands alone, detached and observing. It’s a composition director Philippa Lowthorpe returns to multiple times in H Is for Hawk, and each one cuts a little deeper.

Working from Helen MacDonald’s memoir of the same name, H Is for Hawk is a gentle film about depression. Helen’s father (Brendan Gleeson) dies early in the narrative, and his absence isolates Helen, a professor at Cambridge. She has a few friends, but holds them at arm’s length. When she wants for comfort, she procures a goshawk, Mable.

A goshawk is not an obvious pet—they’re “non-affectionate” creatures as Helen explains—but, then, Helen is not looking for an obvious solution to her grief. Slowly, the two form a bond. But this is not a film where Helen processes her grief through Mabel and comes out of her shell.

Foy’s performance and her relationship with Mabel—an extraordinary bird Foy works with beautifully—anchors H Is for Hawk. Some of the threads Lowenstein and co-screenwriter Emma Donoghue could pull on go unexplored, but so, too, are the obvious ones. Instead, Lowthorpe opts for a movie where the audience is allowed to sit within Helen’s sorrow with no clear-cut answers and marvel at the bird that provides none, yet seems to provoke the questions often unasked.

H Is for Hawk (2025)
Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe
Screenplay by Emma Donoghue, Philippa Lowthorpe
Based on the book by Helen MacDonald
Produced by Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner
Starring: Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, Lindsay Duncan, Josh Dylan
Roadside Attractions, Rated PG-13, Running time 114 minutes, Premiered Aug. 29, 2025, at the Telluride Film Festival

---