HAMNET: Grief Forgets the Play

(Spoilers Ahead)

I watched Hamnet wanting to be undone. The book achieved intimate devastation so effortlessly. Maggie O'Farrell makes grief look like weather writing itself into stone. The film is not about Shakespeare so much as what creation costs the people left behind. It understands this, most of the way. Then doesn't.

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 Buckley alone can't carry the weight of what the film is trying to be.

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.

Hamnet gestures at Hamlet without engaging it. Shakespeare didn't simply reuse a name. Hamlet obsesses over death, inheritance, the unbearable weight of delay. To invoke that without reckoning with it is a missed conversation. I kept waiting for the dialogue between the two works. It never comes.

Instead, the film leans on symbolism. Agnes carrying her son forward, reaching toward the actor embodying Hamlet. Beautiful. They remain gestures. The film shows us what his leaving costs without asking what it built.

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. At moments I wondered whether the character was simply under-formed. A figure instead of a force.

I read Hamlet young. It shaped how I understand loss, hesitation, masculinity, language itself. I kept asking: Where is the bridge? Where is the reckoning? The novel answers that quietly. The film does not.

Buckley's scream is devastating. After that rupture, the world doesn't fully reorganise. The loss doesn't alter the air. The use of Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight" carries cultural weight now. It's beautiful. But it's become shorthand. The moment it begins, you recognise the reach. Here is where you're meant to 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 changes the air. The slow rearrangement of a life.

Hamnet feels 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.