When I first watched Hamnet, it felt like a car crash on slow motion. It felt like Chloé Zhao the director was forcing me to watch the aftermath of the crash, slowly and mercilessly making me relive an undeniable fear, a putrid sense of despair, focusing on how a child’s death destroys a family, shatters a relationship, but ironically bursts open the doors to creativity.
This feature is not only about Shakespeare creating one of his masterpieces, Hamlet, inspired by the death of his son, but about a child’s death and how it affects the parents. A topic so morbid it took her 126 minutes to unravel. But it’s also a tale about selfish male artists, and the plight that free-spirited women face in falling in love with one.
Some people called Hamnet “grief porn”. Entire message boards, fan theories, and social media posts were dedicated to why the sappy sentimentality and the squeezing of viewers’ emotions through total immersion and investment in the tragic tale worked against the movie and not for it. If anything, it could be seen as a testament to Zhao’s prowess as a director, causing some of the most cold-hearted critics to shed tears in the movie theater. Strangely, months after watching the film, some people felt cheated, manipulated into finding it a masterpiece because of the intense emotional state that it put them through. For me, it took me months to write this review. I wanted to see how I look at Hamnet now, and whether the lens of perspective would lead me to admire or despise it.
Admittedly, at first, the film looks like it’s about Agnes, the free-spirited woman that William Shakespeare fell in love with and found common grounds with. It’s Jessie Buckley’s acting vehicle -even though undeniably, Paul Mescal delivers an excellent performance as the selfish Shakespeare who fleetingly visits the family to grieve then goes back to his exciting artistic life- and she takes it to a whole other level, transforming herself into this witch-of-the-forest trope, shedding off all her movie star glamour to become a woman scarred by tragedy, and bitter from the man who failed her. The film is deceptive because from the outside it seems like a timeless tale, or a meta inspection of what grief does to the art and vice versa. But at its core, Hamnet only works when it’s more about Agnes’s heartbreak as a mother and a woman let down by her artist husband, who chases his glory, burying his grief in it, while she is left in the background to wither with the memories of her dead child haunting her around the house.
Zhao doesn’t spare us all the grim details of death. She stabs us with the knife and twists and turns it inside our hearts until we’re left breathless and tormented, just as her protagonists facing their dead child’s corpse. It’s no longer artistry but more like melodramatic intensity and soap-opera worthy extraction of feelings, just helmed with two exceptionally talented actors, and a masterful DOP Łukasz Żal. The feature no longer becomes a story about death, but the act of squeezing toothpaste out of a tube, except the lemon is the viewer (myself included) and Zhao is simply using our tears to make a glass of lemonade.
Is this good or bad? It’s difficult to evaluate films based on that premise solely as the main metric of judgment. Yes there are terrible movies, and there are The Godfather, The Shining, Pulp Fiction, and In the Mood For Love. But it’s tricky to evaluate a film based on manipulating audiences to find it great through lengthy scenes where the camera doesn’t cut of a grieving family taking one last look at their dead child, through a narrow lens like that. The question remains: Does it work? But the bigger question that I am trying to answer through this review is: why did it work for me before but now I feel cheated?
On second viewing, months later after the euphoria of hunting movies during award season, Hamnet seems like the broken spell of a toxic relationship, blurred by the smoke and the haze of the blossoming of love, and that painful day when one wakes up realizing it’s not real. None of what was felt is real.