HAMNET: When Grief Forgets the Play

When Grief Forgets the Play (Spoilers Ahead!)

There are films you admire, and films that move you. They are not always the same thing.

I watched Hamnet wanting to be undone. Wanting that slow, intimate devastation the book achieved so effortlessly on the page. Maggie O’Farrell writes grief the way weather writes itself into stone. Patiently. Irrevocably. Her novel is not about Shakespeare so much as it is about what creation costs the people left behind.

The film understands this. Up to a point. Then it lets go of the rope.

Let me say this clearly first: Jessie Buckley is extraordinary. There is a scream in this film—the moment Agnes realises her child is gone—that feels torn from somewhere pre-verbal. Raw. Animal. Ancient. That moment alone deserves every accolade being whispered in awards rooms.

But a single note, however perfect, cannot hold a symphony.

What unsettled me wasn’t the grief itself, but the structure surrounding it. The film feels divided into emotional movements that never fully reconcile. The final third, especially, drifts from what came before. I understand the intention: to show how grief fractures people differently, how mourning splinters time and meaning. Conceptually, it makes sense. Dramatically, it doesn’t quite land.

Because Hamnet gestures toward Hamlet without ever truly engaging with it.

And that absence matters. Shakespeare didn’t simply reuse a name. Hamlet is obsessed with death, inheritance, delay, and the unbearable weight of unfinished grief. To invoke it without reckoning with its architecture—the theatre, the language, Stratford, the machinery of performance—feels less like restraint and more like a missed conversation.

I kept waiting for the dialogue between the two works to begin. It never quite does. Instead, the film leans heavily on symbolism. Agnes carrying her son forward. Reaching toward the actor who embodies Hamlet at the end. These gestures are beautiful in isolation, but they remain gestures. They do not become insight.

And then there is Shakespeare himself. Portrayed less as a titan of language and more as an absence. A man away, distant, orbiting his own life. This is not an invalid reading, but it feels thin. The film shows us the cost of his leaving without interrogating the exchange. We are told what his work takes, but not what it gives back: to the world, to the play, or even to the grief that supposedly births it.

At moments I wondered—unfairly, perhaps—whether the character felt miscast. Simply under-formed. A figure rather than a force.

Maybe this is where my own history intrudes. I read Hamlet young. It shaped how I understand loss, hesitation, masculinity, and language itself. My intimacy with the play may have sharpened my disappointment. I kept asking: Where is the bridge? Where is the reckoning? Where is the play as a living response to the child’s death, not just a name borrowed from it?

The novel answers that quietly. The film does not.

This doesn’t make Hamnet a failure. It makes it incomplete. A film of moments rather than momentum. Of astonishing performance rather than cumulative meaning. Grief rendered beautifully… but not transformed.

Some losses do not resolve into art. Some stories do not close their own circles. I left the film wishing it had trusted Shakespeare enough to argue with him. To wrestle him. To let the play speak back. Instead, it stands beside him: hesitant, unsure whether to enter the room.

And grief, as we know, is not healed by hesitation.

I have seen grief rendered with deeper narrative consequence elsewhere. Take Train Dreams. An underrated film that really is a masterpiece; and Joel Edgerton is amazing. Spare. Almost skeletal. A story that moves like wind across timber and snow. When loss comes, it settles and alters the air. No announcement, or musical cue. Just the slow rearrangement of a life.

Or consider The Leftovers, perhaps the most unflinching study of collective and private grief in modern television. It does not decorate sorrow. It builds theology out of it. It understands that grief is an ecosystem.

That is where Hamnet falters for me. Buckley’s scream is devastating, but after that rupture, the world does not fully reorganise around the loss. Even the use of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” carries cultural weight now. It is beautiful, yes, but it has become shorthand. The moment it begins, one recognises the directive. Here is where you feel.

In The Leftovers, Richter’s music feels earned, braided into the metaphysical architecture of the series. In Hamnet, toward the end, it feels closer to orchestration than inevitability.

And perhaps that is the quiet disappointment.