theguardian - 8 hours ago

London film festival: Foy convinces as a grieving academic who trains a goshawk in this film based on Helen Macdonald’s bestselling nature memoirCan training a goshawk cure grief? Or treat it, in some way? Will keeping it indoors – hooded so that it remains calm – and then taking it out hunting allow you to reconnect radically with nature in a way that prissy townies will never understand? Or is this just a domesticated festival of cruelty to both bird and prey and a symptom of serious depression?

Philippa Lowthorpe’s intriguing, likably performed if slightly precious film – based on Helen Macdonald’s bestselling nature memoir from 2014 – addresses these questions, but can’t quite deliver the Hollywood redemption narrative that it appears to offer: the story of a woman in the depths of melancholy who is helped through the darkness and, we have to assume, out the other side, by her goshawk, whimsically named Mabel. (Macdonald used she/her pronouns at the time of publication and came out as non-binary in 2022.)

Audiences might, by the closing credits, think they still don’t quite know what happens to Helen and Mabel in the end, or perhaps at any time, but then again real life can feel messy and unfinished in just this way.

Claire Foy plays Macdonald in 2007, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge teaching the history and philosophy of science. She adores and hero-worships her dad, the award-winning photographer Alisdair Macdonald, played here by Brendan Gleeson, who inculcated in her a love of nature, and when he dies she is utterly distraught.

So Helen conceives a mysterious need to buy a goshawk from a dealer. She gets her expert mate Stuart (Sam Spruell) to help her train it and becomes a superbly eccentric Cambridge don for keeping Mabel on her wrist in college but then deeply worries her mum (Lindsay Duncan) by not leaving the house: Helen and Mabel descending into squalor together.

Claire Foy is clearly doing this for real: she has obviously learned to handle a goshawk – and her scenes have a tremendous authenticity. When she looks nervous with Mabel, she is genuinely nervous. When she is thrilled to get Mabel to do something, she is genuinely thrilled. With this bird, there can be no “acting”. The best moment comes when Helen has Mabel in the car, and it looks like Clarice Starling has taken Dr Lecter for a drive.

So has the relationship between Helen and Mabel deepened by the end? Is there, in fact, a relationship? Perhaps this could be scheduled in a season of films about people getting up close and personal with predatory animals, along with Loach’s Kes, Hitchcock’s The Birds and Herzog’s Grizzly Man. Mabel’s ice-cold gaze is very scary.• H is for Hawk screened at the London film festival. Continue reading...

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