Helen Macdonald’s 2015 memoir, H Is for Hawk, won multiple awards, including the Samuel Johnson Prize, and was a Kirkus Prize finalist. It’s easy to understand why. In it, Macdonald tells the story of how they dealt with their profound grief over the sudden death of their father, photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, by purchasing and training a goshawk—a notoriously difficult and dangerous breed to train: “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” they wrote. Woven throughout their recollections is the story of T.H. White, the troubled author of the classic King Arthur saga The Once and Future King (1958) who also wrote The Goshawk (1951), an account of his own disastrous attempts to train a similar bird, despite having no falconry experience. The two stories play off each other brilliantly, clarifying and illuminating both authors’ trials and occasional triumphs. A new, much simpler theatrical film adaptation, starring The Crown’s Claire Foy as Macdonald, is set for a wide U.S. release on Jan. 23.

It’s easy to imagine a producer asking, at an early stage, “Do we really need all this T.H. White stuff?” In any case, none of it is in the finished film; indeed, White isn’t even mentioned. (One wonders if, perhaps, there’s a copy of The Goshawk on a bookshelf in some scene, out of focus, behind Foy and her feathered co-star.) In some alternate universe, there’s a version of this film told from dual perspectives—Macdonald’s, through Foy’s performance, and White’s, as portrayed by, say, Challengers’ Josh O’Connor—highlighting the echoes and rhymes of the two writers’ fraught lives. But that’s not the film we have, which is so pared down that it feels, at times, like a CliffNotes version of the book—and an abridged version, at that.

Emily Dickinson famously wrote that “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers— / That perches in the soul,” but, at least initially, it’s hard to attach a similar symbolic meaning to Macdonald’s goshawk, which was mainly a very efficient killing machine. If the bird is a symbol of anything, it’s death—but this seems to have been key to the author’s grief process: If they could live with death, grow to accept death, and even, on some level, tame death, then they wouldn’t find it so frightening, or so sad. They and death might come to an understanding—one that wouldn’t overwhelm the author with despair. White’s disastrous time with his hawk, as Macdonald portrays it, seems grounded in a similar sense of desperation: He struggled with his closeted sexuality, intense loneliness, and a tendency toward cruelty, but the notion of taming a hawk, a violent beast, was within the realm of possibility, and this seems to have given him some hope, after all.

Unfortunately, little of this makes it to the film, as directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, who co-wrote the screenplay with novelist Emma Donoghue. White is, of course, absent, so the movie focuses solely on Macdonald and their depression—but nearly all the interiority, and complexity, of the author’s text goes missing. The filmmakers don’t ignore the notion of hawk-as-death—a brutal scene of the bird eviscerating a rabbit makes sure of that—but it doesn’t develop this theme in any depth.

Foy is a skilled actor, and she does a fine job of showing how Macdonald’s growing bond with the hawk both preoccupied them and, eventually, healed them. The supporting cast is also quite good, particularly the great Brendan Gleeson in his few scenes as Macdonald’s father. On a narrative level, though, the movie is disappointingly straightforward and predictable, with none of the keen insight of Macdonald’s memoir—which not only makes clear that life goes on, but also that life is complicated, winding, and full of unexpected connections.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.