Film review: H is for Hawk (plus ticket giveaway)

Novels can be difficult to adapt. Depending on the novel, of course, a screenwriter can be as truthful to the source as he deems possible, and a filmmaker can translate the words to the screen visually. But personal memoirs are ALWAYS hard to adapt, because more often than not, the author pours their own thoughts into words on a page, and not even Kucbrick figured out how to do that effectively on screen.

Take Phillipa Lowthorpe’s adaptation of Helen MacDonald’s personal memoir about grief, H is for Hawk. The real story of how MacDonald (here played by Claire Foy) accepted and rationalised the grief from her father’s passing (played by Brendan Gleeson), through her relationship with a goshawk called Mabel.

McDonald is an academic at Cambridge University when her father suddenly passed away. Two months later, she hasn’t been able to move on when she decides to buy and look after a little goshawk, as a nod to her father’s curiosity and passion for nature. The film sprinkles strategic flashbacks when Lowthorpe and her screenwriter, Emma Donoghue (of Room fame), to equip the audience with the necessary context before the next scene plays out.

It’s clear as day how the hawk, an emotionally detached animal, relates to MacDonald’s journey. She says, “She’s not a pet, and she’s not a hobby,” as a reminder that Mabel is an extension of MacDonald. As the film goes on, MacDonald starts merging slowly into the hermit life of a goshawk. After a series of chapters focused on Mabel’s training, MacDonald locks herself in her house, stops cleaning and looking after herself, and forgets to go to class. There’s a plot point where her tenure at the university is about to end, and with it the privilege of using their accommodation. She needs to start packing and find a new place to live. The hawk is a distraction in the early stages of her grief, but it becomes an emotional crutch that doesn’t let her move on from losing her father. I get it, I’ve been through the same; losing a father so suddenly makes one feel powerless. There’s always something left unsaid, there’s guidance we fruitlessly seek.

The hawk is the star of the show. Lowthorpe brings her best game, shooting his scene, which contrasts well with the rest of the film, so boggled by the machinations of grief and the uptight British academy. In the wilderness, Lowthorpe lets the bird fly, swoops the camera up with no constraints. There’s drama, death, and blood. And then we go back to life in Cambridge, where everything is so stifled that even the narrative feels shackled.

French films tend to have another position in film next to the director called the “meteur en scéne”. His responsibility is to stage the scene and add more flavour to the movements and the story. It’s now an ubiquitous position taken by the filmmaker, but one that productions can still profit from. There is no mise-en-scène in H is for Hawk. There’s a scene where MacDonald and her family get the father’s belongings from the hospital, and I remember how anaemic it was. A scene like this needs detail to flesh it out and give it layers. When you receive your dead parent’s belongings in an uncharacterised zip lock bag with their name on the side written with a marker (and often misspelt), there’s a weird impersonal sense that contrasts with the pain you’re feeling. None of that is in, it comes as a checkbox of things that need to happen to follow the story, not a visually relevant point.

The problem is that Lowthorpe loves the source material to a fault. Lost in this adaptation are MacDonald’s deep inner monologues, which add detail to what’s going through their mind. Instead, we’re left with Foy’s intense stiff-upper lip or a couple of scenes that fill in a gap in the most clumsy way. The two most clear cases are every scene MacDonald is approached by a university academic, and she manages to outargue them so swiftly it makes me wonder how they even got the role of a professor. But the worst is the lecture scene, where MacDonald presents a thinly veiled topic related to goshawks and is confronted by a group of young progressives who believe hawks should be fed bird seed. A conversation that definitely only happened inside of a Tory’s fantasy.

H is for Hawk never justifies its staying. If you loved the book, you are equipped to fill in the psychological gaps that the visual medium failed to convey. Otherwise, it’s a pale and incomplete rumination on grief that never explains why we’re not reading the book instead of this. Sometimes, a 110-minute film is more time-consuming than reading 300 pages.

For die-hard fans of the book who have been eagerly awaiting this adaptation for over a decade.

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