"Can 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."
Claire Foy portrays Cambridge fellow Helen Macdonald, a history and philosophy of science don, who collapses into profound grief after her father's death and acquires a goshawk, Mabel. Helen trains and keeps Mabel closely, wearing the bird on her wrist at college and retreating into domestic squalor, worrying her family. The film foregrounds authentic falconry through Foy's convincing handling while probing whether the bird offers real solace or represents a cruel, obsessive distraction. Brendan Gleeson and Lindsay Duncan provide emotional grounding. The narrative resists tidy redemption and leaves Helen's recovery and future relationship with Mabel ambiguous.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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