F is for Fine Feathered Friend.

There’s a scene earlier in “H is for Hawk,” when a young woman is struggling to drive her dead father’s car, has to temporarily park somewhere to see the problem, and then told by a walker that she can’t park there. The rest is in arguing format. She responds that she’s not used to driving her father’s car, and the jerk tells her he should give her lessons. And when she tells him his father is dead, he doesn’t apologize for her loss; she apologies to him for the obstruction. Situations like that in reality can be hostile and just plain headache inducing. But even through her pathos, she handles that scene a lot more maturely than how the mother and daughter handled their own drama in “Regretting You.”

The young woman is Helen Macdonald (Claire Foy), and this movie is inspired by her true story and her memoir about how she adopted a goshawk to help with her grief. It would take a professional to train a bird that would be prone to aggressively chase off humans and larger animals. And since owning one isn’t legal and not everyone is a skilled professional at training birds, there would be cynicism in the mix. The movie doesn’t worry about the legal logistics; it worries about how Helen was able to process her turmoil and turn to a bird to move forward with her life. And therefore, there’s a strong balance of nature and emotions.

Her father Alisdair (Brendan Gleeson) was a press photographer, and this movie shows how he refuses to retire and keep taking pictures. Even coming to a crime scene when the police constantly tell him he can’t be there. And he always wears a suit, because his motto is: “You never know who you’re going to meet.” But while on a business trip, he unexpectedly passes away. Inspired by her good friend Stuart (Sam Spruell) and her childhood with her father, she decides to buy and raise a goshawk.

At first, she struggles with her, and the bird is a female and named Mabel, but she learns to handle her. How would a woman react to her new hawk chasing and eating a rabbit in the woods? How did Sandra Bullock react to a hawk grabbing that little dog in “The Proposal?” But here Helen reacts calmly and proudly, because that’s partly how she learns to connect with her. And she is asked if she could feed Mabel bird seed, but says she’s a carnivore.

Directed by Philippa Lowthrope (“The Crown,” “Misbehaviour”), “H is for Hawk” lacks the emotional support from the likes of Helen’s other good friend and “under-falconer” Christina (Denise Gough) and her mother (Lindsay Duncan), although they respectively check on her. They should do more than just whisper and sit in the sidelines. But the movie does hold our interests and allows us to feel Helen’s pain, especially since we have lost loved ones along there way. Foy plays Helen with sincerity and complexity, and we acknowledge how she handles her pathos like a mature adult.

I saw this movie last month, and I was still thinking about the decisions made here. I don’t know about the real Helen Macdonald’s true story, so I can’t really compare and contrast anything. But I can sense that she was grieving and needed a coping mechanism to get her through. Losing a loved one is hard and I lost all four of my grandparents within the past five years. But I was able to move forward with my life, and I believe Helen has, too. “H is for Hawk” is a nice little dramatization of her story, and a fine feathered friend at that.