H is for Hawk promises to be one of the cinematic highlights of 2026. Ahead of an exclusive screening and Q&A presented by FilmBath at the Little Theatre – Dara Foley finds out more from its makers: Director, Philippa Lowthorpe, co-screenplay writer Emma Donoghue, and best-selling author, Helen Macdonald.
When Helen Macdonald’s memoir H is for Hawk unexpectedly soared to bestseller status in 2014, captivating readers with its thoughtful mix of real grief, the beauty of finding comfort in nature and a determined, curative pursuit of training a wild creature, it didn’t seem an obvious candidate for a film adaptation. Its most powerful moments unfold in the private empathy of mourning and obsession. Yet the book registered deeply in the imaginations of local writer-director Philippa Lowthorpe and novelist Emma Donoghue – who, introduced by the Producer, Dede Gardner of Plan B, have now brought Macdonald’s story to the big screen with an intensity and emotional clarity that is not only faithful to the original story but also something truly cinematic and wholly compelling.
Above left: Author, Helen Macdonald and Goshawk; right: Film Director, Philippa Lowthorpe
Retaining the original title, H is for Hawk will have an exclusive screening presented by FilmBath (followed by a Q&A Session with Lowthorpe and Macdonald), at the Little Theatre Cinema on 17 January – it will be a homecoming of sorts for Lowthorpe, whose work on The Crown, Three Girls, The Other Boleyn Girl, and her critically acclaimed limited series, Prisoner 951 – the story of Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe and her husband Richard’s campaign for her release has earned her an international reputation for nuanced storytelling. However, H is for Hawk is clearly her most delicate of undertakings: a story about a woman whose world collapses in the wake of her father’s sudden death, and who turns to the unforgiving discipline of falconry in order to survive and somehow make sense of her sorrow.
Claire Foy plays Helen Macdonald, the emotionally quiet yet strong protagonist – her grief doesn’t wash through her so much as build up, gathering weight in every glance and gesture. When her beloved father (played by Brendan Gleeson) dies unexpectedly, Helen returns to an abandoned part of herself: the teenage falconer who once understood that tethering yourself to a wild creature is both an act of control and a surrender. She finds Mabel, a young goshawk, and brings the bird home – a decision that becomes its own kind of ritual and its own vocabulary of healing.
The challenge of adapting this was immense. Macdonald’s book slips between memoir, natural history and reflections on T.H. White, the writer and falconer best known for The Sword in the Stone. White’s own turbulent attempts to train a goshawk parallel Macdonald’s in revealing ways, and the film honours that layered structure, weaving the literary, the historical and the deeply personal without feeling weighted down by any of them.
For Emma Donoghue, whose previous screen work includes Room and The Wonder, the book’s shifting textures were part of the appeal.
“Helen’s voice on the page is so interior, so reflective,” Donoghue says. “I knew we couldn’t simply transpose her thoughts into narration. What we aimed for instead was finding the cinematic language of grief – those moments where the world seems slightly off its axis, where you see someone trying to hold themselves together with ritual, with obsession, with absolute concentration.”
Translating falconry itself into something cinematically legible was another of Donoghue’s tasks.
“Falconry is full of technical detail, but it’s also deeply mythic,” she explains. “What fascinated me was the way it becomes a mirror. Helen thinks she’s training Mabel, but she’s really learning how to live again, breath by breath, instinct by instinct.”
Left: The best-selling book jacket
Lowthorpe’s masterful direction avoids sentimentality, a quality that could easily have diluted the film’s emotional honesty. As [leading film and entertainment website] Deadline.com wrote, “The impressive thing about Philippa Lowthorpe’s assured direction and the script she co-wrote with Emma Donoghue is its resistance to easy sentimentality. This is undeniably a story about grief, loss and trying to cope with it all. In lesser hands, the film could have gone for cute animal stuff to lighten the load, but H is for Hawk never succumbs to that temptation, and quite frankly, goshawks don’t make it easy for that to begin with.” It’s a fair point: a goshawk is no cinematic shortcut to charm. It is sharp, unpredictable, and utterly itself.
This fidelity to the nature of the bird – and to the emotional truths of the story – creates a life-affirming film that earns its tears honestly. As Deadline.com continues, “this is a film that doesn’t pander for tears, but genuinely earns them. It is the stuff of life.”
Grief isn’t linear, you don’t move through it like chapters in a book. You circle it, you backtrack, you think you’re fine and then a small thing brings you to your knees
The relationship between Helen and her father forms the emotional architecture of the film. Gleeson appears in her memories – warm, wise, occasionally wry – filling the frame with the solidity of a man who has shaped his daughter’s world. His unexpected departure from it makes Foy’s performance all the more affecting. A woman crushed by loss but who refuses to look away from it, even when doing so unravels her.
Donoghue speaks about maintaining that emotional tension throughout the screenplay. “Grief isn’t linear,” she says. “You don’t move through it like chapters in a book. You circle it, you backtrack, you think you’re fine and then a small thing brings you to your knees. In the script, we wanted the rhythm of that – the way Mabel becomes both an anchor and a catalyst. And Claire captures that beautifully. She carries the story with a kind of wounded dignity.”
Claire Foy’s scenes with Mabel are some of the most arresting in the film. They come with danger, humour and tenderness in them, but also something very raw and exacting: falconry requires precision and presence, both of which align with Helen’s need to control something – anything – in her world suddenly crushed by loss.
For Bath audiences, there is an added pleasure in seeing the work of a director with deep local connections return to the city for FilmBath’s celebratory screening. Lowthorpe’s sensitivity as a storyteller, so evident in all her projects, seems particularly attuned to H is for Hawk. She understands that the film’s heart lies not in dramatic spectacle but in emotional specificity: a woman and a bird, each wary, each fiercely alive, each teaching the other how to move through a world that can be both brutal and breathtaking.
Donoghue hopes audiences will see themselves reflected in that journey.
“So many of us have lived through grief that felt unspeakable,” she says. “Helen’s story gives shape to that experience. I hope people come away feeling that wildness and loss aren’t opposites – they can exist side by side. And sometimes healing happens in the moments when you’re reaching toward something that isn’t tame, that doesn’t fit neatly into your life.”
The result is a film that feels both intimate and expansive, rooted in personal loss yet attentive to the vast, messy landscape of human resilience. It honours the book’s complexity while discovering its own visual poetry, one that unfolds in long, contemplative shots, sudden bursts of movement, and small, tremulous moments of connection.
H is for Hawk arrives not just as an adaptation, but as a meditation – on love, on the wild, and on the delicate work of finding your way back to yourself when the world breaks open. In resisting the temptation to soften the edges, Lowthorpe and Donoghue have created something authentic: a storyline that doesn’t flinch from the hardest parts of being alive, and a film that allows its audience to feel the sharpness and the solace of that truth.
It was important to Lowthorpe to create something that felt “truthful, raw and vivid”. Lowthorpe adds, “I want the audience to feel like they are there with Helen, whether in her front room or out on a hunt. Nothing can get in the way of us relating to and feeling what Helen is going through”.
As the Little Theatre prepares to host the FilmBath screening and Q&A, Jasmine Barker, FilmBath Director adds, “Bath has an extraordinary amount of creative talent and Philippa Lowthorpe is a perfect example of that. We are incredibly proud to host this preview screening and to celebrate her beautiful new film alongside author Helen Macdonald. It is a real privilege for FilmBath to shine a light on exceptional filmmakers who live in our city and continue to shape British storytelling at the highest level.”
H is for Hawk + Q&A with Director Philippa Lowthrope and Author Helen Macdonald. The Little Theatre Cinema, Saturday 17 January, 2.45pm and 5.45pm. Tickets from £13.75. Presented by FilmBath. filmbath.org.uk