(courtesy IMP Awards)
Having just read a book about the messiness of real, honest grief, and not the clean, tidy kind that only exists in societal expectations and narratively convenient movies, it’s refreshing to encounter another story, this one based on a memoir, where grief is shorn of all its supposed niceties and laid out in refreshingly honest that actually feel quite freeing.
H is For Hawk, based on the book of the same name by Helen MacDonald, is the story of a Cambridge academic (played by Claire Foy) whose father dies, leaving her bereft in ways that are instantly and comprehensively debilitating.
Her father’s death exposes some faultlines in her life, like it does in many of us, about how loved she is and how normal and accepted she feels, and as she withdraws from her academic and social lives, she turns to training a goshawk as a way of finding some peace in a deeply troubled time.
While her mother (Lindsay Duncan) and brother James (Josh Dylan) and close friend Christina (Denise Gough) can see how broken she is in the midst of her grief, with her kitchen full of dirty plates and half-eaten food and an unwillingness to engage socially in anything approaching a normal manner, Helen refuses to to acknowledge how deep of a hole of loss she has fallen into.
She turns increasingly to habiuating and training her goshawk Mabel, and while Helen won’t listen to her mother, it’s clear she is using Mabel as a means of distraction but also as a way of staying connected to her photographer father, played with warm idiosyncrasy by Brendan Gleeson, with whom she shared a profound love of the natural world.
The film is peppered with recollections of key moments in her life where she was with her father (who always wore a suit, no matter what he was doing), whether it was him giving her a lift because the trains were a mess or the beginning of his quixotic quest to photograph all the bridges over the Thames form its source in an unremarkable paddock to the sea.
These perfectly pitched moments, often matched with a similar setting or place in Helen’s agonisingly father-less present, beautifully evoke how we yearn to go back in time to when the person we lost was there, to talk with them and feel connected to them.
But as H is For Hawk rather quietly but affectingly makes clear, going back in time is not possible except in our grief-soaked heart and mind, and so Helen must find a way to bring her father into the present, settling on the adoption of Mabel with not a lot of thought and a great deal of instinctual emotion.
Beyond its obvious and incisively nuanced exploration of grief, H is For Hawk is also a love letter to the art of falconry (though Helen is at awkward pains to point out that hawks and falcons are entirely different types of birds of prey) and how we often find ourselves disconnected from the natural world in an age of industrialisation and urbanisation.
While Helen’s love for Mabel, falconry and the natural world is entirely genuine and far-reaching, it is asked to carry a heavy load after the death of her father, carrying her in lieu of friends and family, a job and a home, and expected by her to fill a void that we know can never really be filled.
The fact that it cannot sustain Helen, no matter how wondrously beautiful a calling it may be, becomes ever more apparent as H is For Hawk progresses, emphasised all the more by the fact hawks, while extraordinary creatures, are not the most affectionate of souls.
For that, Helen needs to turn back to her friends and family, and much of H is For Hawk explores what a long and difficult journey that is for her and how hard she finds it to reconnect with the world of people and downplay the presence of Mabel in her life.
Rather refreshingly, this is not a film that pretends you reach a clean and well-defined line after someone’s death where the grief magically and cleanly falls away and normal life resumes as if nothing has happened.
For a start you can’t go back to what was there before; it is lost forever and can never be reclaimed because one of the integral people in it are no longer around.
But beyond that, grief doesn’t follow clean, linear lines and one of the most rewarding and comforting parts of Helene’s story is that H is For Hawk doesn’t pretend otherwise.
In fact, without giving too much away, the film ends with Helen back on her way to the land of the living, but still caught in the grip of grief and depression and, while healing, a long way from being healed.
It’s a brave step for any film, because movies usually like a clean and uplifting end, and an important one because it gives those of still struggling to really transition to a post grief future an assurance that any accommodation with this brave new beloved person-less world of ours is one of degrees and not neatly demarcated solid blocks.
And that is a profound relief on so many levels.
Charming and measured and nuanced in a way that many stories about grief struggle to achieve, H is For Hawk is grittily honest too about the fact that whatever you use to distract you in a time of grief and pain is no substitute for fully engaging once again with the fallible, broken human world.
At some point, and during H is For Hawk Helen movingly but quietly reaches it, we have to find our way back to the people we love, to the world which makes sense to us and to the messy business of living, and hard though it is, it’s a quiet, comforting joy to be on that journey with Helen and to see her begin to reconnect with life again and realise that normalcy has been redefined in ways that will take some getting used to.