In a recent interview with Chloé Zhao, the broadcaster Edith Bowman apologised for her emotional response to the director’s new film, Hamnet. “Please, that’s what this is for,” Zhao replied, not unlike a therapist. Bowman is, of course, far from alone in her reaction. Hamnet has generated a Jonestown-like response in audiences so far. At my BFI London Film Festival screening in October, people were paralysed in their seats sobbing, friends clutching each other. Such a physical response to a piece of filmmaking should be commended – it has, evidently, achieved its goal. One of the most rewarding parts of watching films is the richness of feeling when art has earned your tears. You feel alive because a piece of filmmaking has met you halfway and inspired such a reaction. It’s unfortunate, then, that Hamnet is so insistent on sandblasting the tears out of you.
If a film makes you cry, does that make it good? Writer Caitlin Quinlan raised this question in a 2023 essay for Art Review, about the bland, crowd-pleasing homogeneity of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and that year’s cinematic offerings. “If filmmaking can reject mass appeal as a business model, this pink period might be followed by a purple patch,” she concluded. Hamnet, a film calculated to appeal to everyone, is here to shoot down her optimism. Crafting something designed to make you cry is not actually proof of expert filmmaking; the John Lewis Christmas ad achieves the same effect in under two minutes. Tears are not an objective marker of a film’s quality. The charge of “emotional manipulation” has been levied against Hamnet, and the counterargument is that all films are a form of emotional manipulation. But, as we’re in the business of film criticism here, it’s important to note that some films are extraordinarily successful at disguising the guile and manoeuvring involved in manipulation. Hamnet is not one of them.
Having sat through it twice, it’s clear to me that Hamnet is not a film made up of intelligent choices. From the epigraph – explaining that Hamnet and Hamlet are functionally the same name – to the finale scored to Max Richter’s Volvo advert-friendly “On the Nature of Daylight,” Hamnet is a blunt spade designed to whack you over the head until you weep from the pain. It has been marketed as a film that burrows down to a primal, base feeling – an effective way of writing off its crude creative decisions. It dramatises Shakespeare and his wife’s response to their son’s sudden death from the plague, and it has one mission statement that it knows you cannot find fault with: the death of a child is a universal tragedy. If you take issue with Hamnet creatively then you are, of course, a cold-blooded cynic who doesn’t possess enough love in their heart.
The hollowness of Hamnet is more obvious when you’re familiar with the source material, Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel. O’Farrell co-wrote the script with Zhao and has taken considerable liberties with her own text. The book is a far more tasteful exercise, scarcely quoting Hamlet and never actually naming Shakespeare (he is simply “husband” or “father”). The decision to alter the novel and incorporate the Bard himself, played by internet pin-up Paul Mescal, was made to maximise legibility and convey a sense of artistic prestige. O’Farrell’s original focus was Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), a woman whose life has often been overlooked, and the author refrains from turning her book into Shakespeare fan fiction. The same cannot be said for the film, which provides an origin story for Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech as well as the three witches from Macbeth. It is laughably shallow. The easter egg references to Shakespeare’s works hit the same level of lowbrow, IP-dependent cringe as Wicked’s “what colour should the Brick Road be?” moment. It tracks, though, because Zhao recently told The Times: “On paper, when you look at it, this is a heavy historical drama and not IP. But for me, Shakespeare is the ultimate IP.”
Hamnet’s wink-wink allusions to Shakespeare’s work appear to make sense when you realise that Zhao actually started her career penning fan fiction. It would be easy, then, to consider Hamnet a work of fan fiction, but Zhao is – by her own admission – not a fan of Shakespeare. She has spoken about how, as a Chinese-born filmmaker, she wasn’t raised with Shakespeare as a cultural standard-bearer and that she relied on O’Farrell and Mescal to navigate the text. But the plot of Hamlet cannot, like tracing paper, be cleanly laid over the life of William Shakespeare. Hamlet himself is the vengeful, arrogant Prince of Denmark, not a frightened little boy. There is a specific reason why O’Farrell maintained minimal reference to the play in her novel and focused almost entirely on Agnes’s internal maelstrom of emotions. Hamnet doesn’t actually make sense if you know even the tiniest thing about Hamlet.
Through the character of Agnes, the daughter of a woodland witch, Hamnet fashions itself as a rich fable in touch with its spiritual side. It’s an appealing start, but Zhao and O’Farrell’s script is bizarrely incurious about Agnes and, unlike the novel, merely gestures to some vague ideas of motherhood and earthy, grounded femininity. The couple’s romance is the foundation of Hamnet, but their courtship is presented on fast-forward, and Agnes simply isn’t a character before she becomes defined as a wife and mother. Buckley’s performance is a committed one, but her big scene – Hamnet’s death – is an unfortunate display of Rada ham, a capital-A acting exercise made to be seen from outer space. There is no finesse or richness to the character beyond surface-level theatrics, and Buckley is sorely let down by the script. Her strength as an actor – as seen in The Lost Daughter and Women Talking – has always been her subtlety, her half-moon smile, the way she can compel your attention in a room full of Hollywood heavyweights. Her Hamnet performance, in contrast, is heavy-handed. But the Oscar has already been engraved.
Zhao’s brand of sumptuous naturalism – with 2020’s Nomadland, she made her name and won the Best Director Oscar by capturing the lonely, golden hour landscape of the American Midwest – has been replaced here by a literalism that seems unbecoming of her. Everything is telegraphed, everything is shown, subtext is a foreign thing. No scene pauses to let you absorb what’s happening. The closest the film gets to showing, not telling, is swiftly undercut by the overused Richter track. Grief is an unfathomably complex process and a film centred around it should be assembled with a defter touch than this. Hamnet is a plain film by design, made to be projected onto, with only one destination in mind. The elaborate pulley system designed to induce tears has rarely been so noticeable. Crying at the movies is one of life’s greatest pleasures. But there is a dignity in having them earned.
