When any “beloved work of literature” is made into a film, there’s always a “niggling worry” that the book will not be “fully realised” on screen, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. But happily, this adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s bestselling 2014 memoir does ample justice to its source material.
The film stars Claire Foy as Helen, an academic whose life falls apart when her photographer father (Brendan Gleeson) dies.
With her career derailing, she buys a goshawk she names Mabel, and becomes “obsessed” with the idea of training it. Her falconry buddy Stuart (Sam Spruell) has warned her that hawks are “perfectly evolved” psychopaths, but she starts to feel a deep connection with Mabel.
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Foy, “who seems undaunted by having her face well within gouging distance” of the bird’s beak and claws, gives a “terrific, committed performance”, and the film cleverly “streamlines the multi-stranded structure of the book ... without diminishing its candour and emotional heft”.
The film is rather slow, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday, but “I liked it”. The flying sequences are “fabulous” – though you pity the rabbits and pheasants that get in Mabel’s way – and the ending is “unexpectedly lovely”.
“Foy is excellent”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator, and the film isn’t too “Hollywood”: there are no “flashes of sudden insight”, for instance. But I did find myself wondering, “is it right, keeping a wild animal captive”?
For a lot of the film, this “magnificent” bird just sits in Helen’s living room, “tethered to her perch, ankles in chains, wearing one of those creepy hoods that blocks all vision”. Macdonald’s story is told perfectly well, “but if you are #TeamMabel, your empathy may not be where the film wishes it to be”.
