A hawk, one assumes, cannot experience self-pity. Where would it sit in their existence, anyway, in that space between the fleeing rabbit and its shredded, pink flesh? In Philippa Lowthorpe’s H Is for Hawk, based on a 2014 memoir by naturalist Helen Macdonald, a friend describes the predatory goshawk as a “perfectly evolved psychopath”.
It’s that escape from sentiment, from the drowning force of grief, that leads Helen (Claire Foy) to become trapped in a spiralling dependency on a goshawk named Mabel. A bird of prey, after all, will never tilt their head and offer their sympathies. And, in Lowthorpe’s tender handling of the material, working from a script written by Room author Emma Donoghue, what comes across first as an eccentric coping mechanism shifts into something less easily defined, more slippery.
