When Helen's beloved father passes away, she is knocked sideways by grief and loses herself in memories of their time birding and exploring the natural world together. She becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk, and so she brings the fearsome bird Mabel home to her life as a graduate fellow at Cambridge. Helen fills the freezer with hawk food and turns off her phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals. But as she labours to tame Mabel, a grieving Helen undergoes an untaming of her own. A record of a spiritual journey, H IS FOR HAWK is a story about memory and nature and how it might be possible to reconcile death with life and love.

Based on the 2014 biographical novel by naturalist Helen MacDonald H is for Hawk (the film version) could so easily have ended up feeling like as an expensive television drama. However, thanks to a wonderful performance from Claire Foy, her interaction with the Goshawk is as moving as it is dramatic, and some breathtaking wildlife photography, director Philippa Lowthorpe and her filmmaking team trained a Goshawk to follow a drone, H is for Hawk turns out to be a wonderful piece of cinema that’s only let down by an overly sentimental final third.