In the wake of her father’s sudden death in 2007, the English academic Helen Macdonald turned to training a goshawk, attempting to stave off depression by subsuming her grief in a relationship with a bird of prey—not just any bird but one considered notoriously difficult to train, even for trained falconers. But the goshawk’s fierce, unpredictable nature spoke to something wild in Macdonald’s own temperament, to her impulsive and perhaps self-destructive desire to withdraw from civilization, taking solace in the natural world.
Claire Foy, best known for playing a young Queen Elizabeth in the “The Crown,” is heartbreaking in this adaptation’s main role: steely and stoic in the stiff-upper-lip tradition yet thoroughly conscious of her sorrow, which smarts beneath all the poised expressions like the inner wound it is. Ebert