H Is for Hawk Review

Most people don't have the time, money, or energy to watch many movies, so when you do get a chance to watch something, you want it to be worthwhile. That's why Rotten Tomatoes exists: to give a snapshot of whether a movie is worth your time. But does it always work? I'll be watching all of Rotten Tomatoes’ Certified Fresh movies from this Wikipedia list, and we'll see if these movies are really worth the hype.

Movie 9 of 2026:

H Is for Hawk, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, is your typical based on a true story fare. This one comes straight from Helen MacDonald’s memoir of the same name. Claire Foy plays MacDonald, and it's an expectedly good performance from a very talented actor. The themes are grief and depression, which have definitely been explored in many films.

The story starts by letting the audience know that Helen has a very close relationship with her father, Alisdair (Brendan Gleeson), who is an accomplished photographer. He instills in her a love for nature and knowledge, which culminates in Helen working at a university. All at once, it seems, Helen loses her father, her work contract is up, and she will have to move out of university housing. This is a lot for one person to take, so she copes by adopting a slightly unruly Hawk that she names Mabel.

My biggest issue with this movie was, honestly, how grief was portrayed. I didn't find the writing or the acting to be dishonest; it's just that this is a topic that we see explored a lot, and I felt like I had seen the way this was presented many times before. It was hard for me to fully engage, because it didn't feel new or different. The most interesting parts of the film involved Helen training Mabel, but that didn't even seem to be our main focus. She gets scared that she's going to lose her hawk when Mabel flies away to hunt, and this happens multiple times. Each time, we never even see how she got Mabel back. It's just a cut to her in the car with her hawk safe and sound.

We also see Helen with cuts on her face partway through the movie. It's established that this was done by Mabel, but we never got to see that. I think it would have been interesting to see how that dynamic manifested and changed, but it's all told only through dialogue. I thought the scene where she was giving a speech about Mabel was really visually interesting. I loved it when Helen got more and more stressed, the cuts on her face started to open up, but, again, we didn't really dig into that and explore it. Too many interesting things felt a bit brushed off.

The biggest positive here was definitely Claire Foy's performance. She captured the symptoms of depression very well. I always felt the internal isolation that comes with depression in her mannerisms. I was also impressed by the use of real animals. I'm sure it took a lot of training to film those scenes, and that's always really cool.

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 80%

Is it worth the hype?:

It wasn't for me. There was a lot of showing and not telling here. A lot of interesting plot points and character motivations seem to be happening off-screen, which made it hard to fully engage with the material. Foy’s lead performance is fantastic, but the movie retreads a lot of tropes that I've seen before. I'd only give this a shot if you find the themes personally affecting.