I saw Hamnet with my husband and my mother-in-law over the Thanksgiving break in New York, and it was phenomenal. So heartbreaking. It just absolutely destroyed me. Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal’s performances are both just out of this world, and I was really astounded by all the young actors in the film, too. I was just blown away by it.
Watching Jessie Buckley’s character Agnes seeing Hamlet at the end, you can read every thought running through her head. And then the way she finally comes to understand how her husband was dealing with his grief, even though she has been holding all this resentment for him for not doing it the same way as her, it hit me so hard. Going in, I knew a little bit about the plot, but I hadn't read the book. I expected it to be sad, because I knew the basic premise – that it was about Shakespeare's son dying and how that inspired Hamlet – but it just really hit me hard. I feel like a film usually doesn't want to sit in moments of death too long, but the choices Chloé Zhao made really felt so truthful to how the characters would experience it. For a story about grief, it just felt very real and it wouldn't have felt like such a complete story without holding on all those beats.
The ending of Hamnet was extremely cathartic. When we left the theater, we all got in the car and went to dinner, and it was like there was a silence over the car. Everyone was just sitting with the film and their emotions around it. But then I was also so inspired by the filmmaking and the acting. I really, really loved it. I didn't expect it to move me as much as it did.
When I was watching the performances on screen, I didn’t think about them from a technical standpoint, as I like to get lost in the narrative and the emotions of a film. And then afterwards, I do like thinking about why I felt the way I did and how those moments were constructed. I talked with my husband and mother-in-law about Hamnet afterwards, as there's so much in it to absorb. Jessie Buckley’s character is just dealing with grief for so long, but it’s amazing how she was able to build a performance that had peaks and valleys, even from the death onward. And playing those different colors, from the guttural scream she let out when her son dies and then the anger she has with her husband, to that cathartic moment she has at the end. It just felt like a perfect combination of all of tones, because if one element of it is wrong, it just doesn't hit us.
Hamnet does some other tricky things really well, too. I always feel like scenes in a movie where characters are writing can feel very awkward and are not usually very cinematic, but the way Paul Mescal (as Shakespeare) delivered the “To be or not to be” speech standing on the dock, and Chloé Zhao found a way for it to be about what he’s really feeling and finding that speech, that was really special. As audience members, we are getting to see such an iconic piece of text, but with an entirely different backstory meaning behind it. It was great.
