HAMNET: 4 STARS. “an open wound; a profound portrait of heartache.”
SYNOPSIS: “Hamnet,” is a fictionalized look how the the lives of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes Hathaway are left in tatters following their son Hamnet’s death from the plague.
CAST: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn. Directed by Chloé Zhao.
REVIEW: Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, “Hamnet” is an unflinching portrait of love and loss.
Set in Warwickshire, England in the late 16th century, “Hamnet” begins with love at first sight between the free-spirited Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) and Latin tutor and poet William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal). Defying their families, they marry and soon have twins, Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe).
When Hamnet is stricken with the bubonic plague, Agnes cares for him as Will, unaware of his son’s illness, works in London and returns after the boy’s death. Consumed by grief, they live separate lives of anguish, until that pain transforms into a work of art that provides an opportunity to heal.
Intimate and as raw, “Hamnet” is an open wound; a profound portrait of heartache that is as uncompromising as it is emotionally involving in its depiction of a mother’s loss of a child. Buckley, one of the finest actors of her generation, taps into the harrowing stages of grief with an unforgettable ferocity. Her despair is palatable, which makes the extended “healing power of art” climax, the climb out of the abyss of woe, even more powerful.
It’s not a spoiler to note that the work of art in question is Shakespeare’s tragedy “Hamlet.” (BUT TREAD CAREFULLY, DETAILS TO FOLLOW) A title card at the film’s beginning reads, “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.”
As an examination of death from all angles—philosophical, emotional, spiritual and physical—the writing and preforming of “Hamlet” is an epiphany for both William and Agnes, in that it meets mortality head-on, from the mourning of a loved one, to the effects of loss on those left behind and the fear of, “what dreams may come” in “that undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns.” Their healing may never be complete, but the play’s examination of art as a source of solace is uplifting.
The play, which makes up much of the film’s final moments, may be the thing, but it’s director Chloé Zhao’s intimate exploration of child loss, as expressed by Buckley’s riveting performance, that sticks. It’s so overwhelming I may never submit to the raw intensity of it again—it’s not a movie you could rightly say you “enjoyed”—but it stands as a powerful study of loss.
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