Peer-Reviewed Movies

Hamnet is a complicated film for me to review because, simply put, I felt barely any emotion watching it. But this review is not an attempt to disparage the film just because I didn’t personally connect with it. Instead, I want to explore why the film has created such an emotional divide within its audience. Some view it cynically as a substanceless, emotionally manipulative tear-jerker, while others see it as a truly sincere film exploring grief so viscerally that it naturally becomes a tear-jerker. Understanding the intent of Hamnet and how it evokes such emotions (or the lack thereof) is essential for understanding this divide.

Hamnet can’t be seen by most audience members only as an exploration into two people's different griefs grieve because the story is connected to the famous but personally obscure English writer, William Shakespeare. So little is known of Shakespeare’s life that it has become the topic of constant debate. Some come to the conclusion that Shakespeare put none of himself into his works, while others argue that the key to understanding him is within his works. Thus, many narratives have been constructed around him without anyone ever being able to say with certainty whether they are truthful or not.

 Hamnet is historical fiction, and it never asserts to be making truthful claims about Shakespeare, but it does, in a sense, argue for specific narratives about Shakespeare by trying to make them fit into the actual historical events. For example, the semi-widespread idea of Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare’s wife, not the actress) being hated by Shakespeare was a narrative that Maggie O’Farrell, the author of Hamnet, wanted to specifically counter. That narrative is based on a few pieces of evidence; Shakespeare largely spent time away from his family in London, his sonnets were written about other women (and men) and never about his wife, and he left Anne nothing but his “second best bed” in his will, which some have interpreted as calling her his second lover. However, most of those claims have been refuted with other evidence that he did, in fact, love her, such as a letter being addressed to a Mrs Shakspaire in London proving she may have lived with Shakespeare, and the “second best bed” being considered a reference to their marital bed rather than a slight. In the SBIFF Cinema Society Q&A, O’Farrell said she believes there is no evidence for the narrative that Shakespeare hated her and that there is evidence for him loving her instead. One of her stated goals in writing the novel was to make readers “forget everything they thought they knew about Anne.” 

As part of that goal, the book stopped being a story about fathers and sons through Will’s character, but rather an exploration of motherhood through Anne’s character as a response to the narrative around her. Shakespeare is never even mentioned by name in the book because, according to the author, the mere presence of his name is too distracting from Agnes’s story. However, it’s still difficult to accept this story only as the story of a grieving mother when the whole catharsis of it is based on another proposed narrative about Shakespeare —  that being Hamlet was a response by Shakespeare to the death of his son Hamnet (a name which at the time was identical to Hamlet). At the start of the film, we are presented with a quote illustrating this point from a paper by Stephen Greenblatt aptly named “The Death of Hamnet and the Birth of Hamlet.” I believe this is partially responsible for the split in this film’s audience. It must be accepted on its own terms in a way that some people can’t. 

The film’s termsrequire relinquishing expectations of a Shakespeare biopic, while also accepting that this story about two grieving people will explicitly tie into and be fed by the mythos of his character. It’s important to mention the distinction between novel and film at this point because the film complicates this further by not making it primarily about Anne. The film has several additional scenes of Will working on his plays and living in London, while the novel stays only in Stratford with Anne. In some ways, this decision strengthens what the film specifically is trying to get across, but it also hurts the film in other ways that sharpen the divide of the audience. I believe the film’s goal is to explore art as a medium for shared grief. This applies very literally through how Will shows Agnes (Agnes is Anne’s name in the film) how he is also grieving Hamnet’s death in his own way through the play, but also in a meta sense that the whole audience shares the film’s grief and each other's grief to an extent. In the film itself, the whole crying audience watching Hamlet reaches out their hands to Richard Burbage as he plays Hamlet’s death. It’s this idea that grief connects everyone, including the audience, that I have found to be the film’s thesis through interviews and audience reactions. Including a larger portion of Shakespeare’s storyline was essential to this theme as it more explicitly explores how Will’s grief differs from Agnes’ and how art/storytelling will ultimately connect both of them. 

However, the way they used Shakespeare doesn’t always work, and I believe it prevents some people from connecting to the film. For example, there is one scene that I (and others I have seen online) laughed at during the film — Will attempting suicide while reciting “To be or not to be.” It’s difficult to exactly pinpoint what makes this so abrupt and kitschy for many. It feels as if it's stretching the terms of the film because it feels so referential and on the nose to Shakespeare’s mythos. It’s like a biopic beat of “Ohh, this is where this person got this iconic thing from” in a film that has so far made us reject the idea of a typical biopic. It makes the film feel less sincere. The film is aware of how there is something epic in how it relates to the grand figure of Shakespeare and uses it to somewhat hook the audience. As previously mentioned, the film starts by explicitly stating its connection to Hamlet so that, in a sense, people feel the film is “important” and about something grander. This could also be a very niche experience, but for people like my father watching the film, he didn’t realize the film was about Shakespeare until the climax, where Will’s full name is said out loud (something that the book never does). Ultimately, even if the film is avoiding the distraction of the grandness of Shakespeare’s character, it does feed it and use it as a hook regardless. The film’s terms also expect the portion of its audience who know the story of Hamlet to simply accept the way the film frames it with a narrative of grief behind it. For example, the stage of the play is a forest, which makes no sense in the context of the play, but it does in the film to represent Will responding to Anne’s own method of coping through nature. And to those who know how different the circumstances and characters of Hamlet are to those of Hamnet, I think it could also lead to some dissonance within the audience. 

The other reasons for the film’s divide outside of Shakespeare’s character lie in people’s perception of how it deals with grief. One complaint I have commonly seen towards the film is characterizing being “manipulative.” I find this difficult to agree with, considering all storytelling is effectively trying to “manipulate” you into certain feelings and there is nothing wrong with that. However, it’s important to understand where the sentiment comes from. One of Zhao’s directorial decisions in this film was holding the camera and being as still as possible to connect with the character’s emotions. This leads to rather long scenes of Agnes going through childbirth while we focus on her expressions or minute long shots of the character's crying. This is all done in service of the film’s goal of shared grief. It wants to elicit a reaction from the audience from them witnessing these characters cry and suffer so much. This attempt worked for many people, and you can even read cases of whole theatres crying at the film’s ending. Many have reflected that it was the community aspect of having everyone crying alongside you that made the film so powerful. I think the film especially works for many because it allows them to fill in the characters with their own experiences with loss. But other viewers, including myself to some extent, didn’t feel anything. It’s so intent on making you cry that some viewers can see through these attempts and label the film as insincere or melodramatic. For example, some will see Zhao’s still long shots as milking emotions for too long without cutting. There is also another factor that, for some, completely ruined the climax of the film and made them see it as tear-jerking bait —  Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” as the score for the final scene. This soundtrack has been separately used in at least ten other movies and shows for the specific goal of making an emotional ending scene. For many, this broke their immersion into the film and made them see it as something formulaically attempting to make you cry. 

My disconnect with the film is different. I knew where the film would be going for the most part. The film spoils the death of Hamnet from the opening, and the theory of his death influencing Hamlet is already widely known. The film did everything exactly as I expected and left me sort of bored throughout. I was at least expecting to be connected to the characters, but they felt underdeveloped and practically only archetypes. Compared to something like The Tale of Princess Kaguya, which makes you invested in the natural side of life before pulling you away, I felt no attachment to the forests that Agnes loved and were crucial to her character. However, even with all this considered, I wouldn't agree with the consensus that this film is simply a tear-jerker with no substance. The visual language, performances, and commentary it made on Shakespeare’s nature were incredibly interesting. Something I noticed while being otherwise bored with the film was how deliberately it used exits and entrances. During scenes with Will, he is the only one who either enters or exits a scene until the final scene with an imagined version of his son, signifying how his character effectively is transcendent to the story through how he overcomes his grief. There’s still something to enjoy in this film, even if one doesn’t find it emotionally riveting. It succeeded in its goal of making people share their grief to some extent, but it was always an impossible task to connect with everyone.

Ephraim Aquino prefers to go by Finn. He is a brainrotted senior taking AP Calculus AB and AP Euro (and somehow TAing AP Lit). He's Brazilian and hopes to one day be a writer.