HAMNET: Grief Forgets the Play
(Spoilers Ahead!)
I watched Hamnet wanting to be undone. Wanting that intimate devastation the book achieved so effortlessly. Maggie O'Farrell writes grief the way weather writes itself into stone. The 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.
Jessie Buckley is extraordinary. There is a scream in this film—the moment Agnes realises her child is gone—that feels raw, ancient. That moment alone deserves every accolade being whispered in awards rooms.
But a single note, however perfect, cannot hold a symphony.
The film feels divided into emotional movements that never fully reconcile. The final third drifts from what came before. I understand the intention: to show how grief fractures people differently. Conceptually, it makes sense. Dramatically, it doesn't quite land.
Because Hamnet gestures toward Hamlet without ever truly engaging with it.
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 feels 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. Beautiful in isolation. They remain gestures.
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. The film shows us the cost of his leaving without interrogating the exchange. We are told what his work takes; not what it gives back.
At moments I wondered whether the character felt miscast. Under-formed. A figure rather than a force.
I read Hamlet young. It shaped how I understand loss, hesitation, masculinity and language itself. I kept asking: Where is the bridge and 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.
Buckley's scream is devastating. But after that rupture, the world does not fully reorganise around the loss. The use of Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight" carries cultural weight now. It is beautiful. 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, it feels closer to orchestration than inevitability.
Train Dreams did this better. Joel Edgerton carries a story that moves like wind across trees and snow. When loss comes, it alters the air. Just the slow rearrangement of a life.
Hamnet is incomplete. A film of moments rather than momentum. Of astonishing performance rather than cumulative meaning. Grief rendered beautifully but not transformed.
The film stands beside Shakespeare: hesitant, unsure whether to enter the room.
(Spoilers Ahead!)
I watched Hamnet wanting to be undone. Wanting that intimate devastation the book achieved so effortlessly. Maggie O'Farrell writes grief the way weather writes itself into stone. The 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.
Jessie Buckley is extraordinary. There is a scream in this film—the moment Agnes realises her child is gone—that feels raw, ancient. That moment alone deserves every accolade being whispered in awards rooms.
But a single note, however perfect, cannot hold a symphony.
The film feels divided into emotional movements that never fully reconcile. The final third drifts from what came before. I understand the intention: to show how grief fractures people differently. Conceptually, it makes sense. Dramatically, it doesn't quite land.
Because Hamnet gestures toward Hamlet without ever truly engaging with it.
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 feels 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. Beautiful in isolation. They remain gestures.
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. The film shows us the cost of his leaving without interrogating the exchange. We are told what his work takes; not what it gives back.
At moments I wondered whether the character felt miscast. Under-formed. A figure rather than a force.
I read Hamlet young. It shaped how I understand loss, hesitation, masculinity and language itself. I kept asking: Where is the bridge and 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.
Buckley's scream is devastating. But after that rupture, the world does not fully reorganise around the loss. The use of Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight" carries cultural weight now. It is beautiful. 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, it feels closer to orchestration than inevitability.
Train Dreams did this better. Joel Edgerton carries a story that moves like wind across trees and snow. When loss comes, it alters the air. Just the slow rearrangement of a life.
Hamnet is incomplete. A film of moments rather than momentum. Of astonishing performance rather than cumulative meaning. Grief rendered beautifully but not transformed.
The film stands beside Shakespeare: hesitant, unsure whether to enter the room.