Hamnet (2025, Chloé Zhao)

40/100

From apathy to enmity: a journey. Spent the movie’s first hour or so faintly bored, which seems almost inevitable—it’s essentially a biopic focused on the celebrated person’s wife and small children, about whom virtually nothing is known. Even the cause of Hamnet’s death is a mystery. (Hell, we don’t even know for sure what people called Mrs. Shakes, a detail of which I was previously unaware; spent the entire damn movie wondering why only “Agnes” had been renamed.) Doesn’t preclude richly imaginative fiction, of course, but there’s scarcely any of that to be found here. The kindest thing I can say about Hamnet pre-plague is that it only occasionally tosses phrases from Hamlet into Will’s and Agnes’ extemporaneous speech (to then be remembered and incorporated by him), rather than constantly doing that. Still plenty annoying, mind you, but it could easily have been a whole lot worse, and appreciating the uncharacteristic restraint at least gave my starved mind something to do.

Then it’s time for Jessie Buckley to perform raw high-decibel anguish. Ironically, I watched Hamnet almost immediately after Jay Kelly, in which the title character at one point accurately notes that the best way for an actor to make the audience cry is to not cry. That’s certainly true for me, anyway—I tend to be most powerfully moved by the sight of someone struggling to keep it together while clearly suppressing a primal scream. But it’s not hard to understand how a bereaved mother giving her emotions literally full throat can emotionally wreck others. It’s harrowing to witness. Maggie O’Farrell (and/or Zhao, but I assume it’s in the novel) also invents the touching idea of Hamnet volunteering as Death’s tribute, playing on one of the very few things we actually do know, viz. that Hamnet and Judith were twins (hence quite possibly unusually close, as twins can be). Still kind of a tearjerking gimme, but effective.

Finally, though, Hamnet does what I assumed and feared it would: posit Hamnet’s death as the primary creative impetus for Hamlet. That’s always struck me not just as bullshit but as downright insulting bullshit, treating arguably the English language’s greatest writer as if he were doing an exercise assigned by his therapist. One can perhaps plausibly ascribe Shakespeare’s turn-of-the-century penchant for tragedies to lingering parental grief, but the examples specific to Hamlet, both in this film and elsewhere, are so vague that they function in the same one-size-fits-all mode as horoscopes. “Adieu, adieu. Remember me” ooo! just like our child surely wishes to be remembered. Sure Jan. It wouldn’t be even remotely difficult to cull similarly morbid passages from plays Shakespeare wrote while Hamnet was alive and well. Because examining the human condition’s painful aspects was his job. For fuck’s sake.

In any case, “What does this have to do with my son dying?” seemed to me a pretty fair question on Agnes’ part, and I unfortunately never really bought her subsequent dawning comprehension/catharsis (though casting brothers with recognizably similar features as Hamnet and the actor who plays Hamlet was a clever touch; also nice to see an appropriate-age Hamlet for once). The whole impulse behind Hamnet (novel or film), striving to locate or theorize some autobiographical tidbit lurking beneath every creative act, strikes me as fundamentally anti-art…but I’d have preferred an entirely fictional version inspired by Shakespeare and Hamlet but not actually employing either. (No, the cutesy ploy of not having anyone say “Shakespeare” until the very end doesn’t count. Not when we see him writing Romeo & Juliet early on.) That would have allowed for oblique dead-son allusions in the made-up play that don’t seem akin to ostensible evidence for the Oxfordian theory of authorship (also bullshit, for the record). Much less marketable, however. I’ll admit to getting weepy when first Agnes and then the other up-front groundlings take Hamlet’s hand during V.ii, but that’s more a testament to the unique power of live theater than anything else. And it requires pretending that Fortinbras doesn’t enter following “the rest is silence,” so eye-mist rescinded.