C an 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. (Macdonald

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