Hamnet: Grief, Art, and Movie Theaters
Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed 2020 novel Hamnet is not just a tear-jerker, but a movie specifically engineered to leave everyone in the audience a wreck. That radically emotional response isn’t just a facet of the film's compassionate power, but emblematic of Zhao’s notion of the ways we channel grief. For Zhao, grief collectively suffuses through all who bear witness to it, sparking catharsis in both the audience and the characters of the film. All of this is viewed through the lens of parenting, which is portrayed as the greatest act of creativity. Once that is ripped away from us, however, we are left with a singular option: using art to hand over our life to remember theirs. In this way, characters trade positions, ultimately becoming apparitions.
Hamnet follows Agnes, played by the always incredible Jesse Buckley, before she becomes a grieving mother. Agnes is a young woman, disconnected with the people who occupy her sphere, and interested in the nonhuman. She is a falconer with a supernatural link to the forest, a connection formed while learning about herbs and the subconscious from her late mother. Paul Mescal plays the movie’s co-lead (regardless of what award bodies say, it is absolutely not a supporting role) as the legendary playwright William Shakespeare, an impoverished Latin teacher whose interest in literature disconnects him from his immediate family. Both characters are played to near perfection by Buckley and Mescal, and are bound together by a similarly unconventional captivation with something greater than themselves: myth and magic.
As you’d expect from two young and gorgeous outsiders who just met each other, they start making out immediately. After the moment evaporates, they awkwardly dart away, unsure of how to handle their obvious interest in each other. After Will hears about Agnes’ residence in the forest, they encounter again in the same natural setting that Agnes frequently inhabits. In this location, Will fully gains her infatuation through his emotionally-charged recitation of Orpheus’ journey to the underworld, detailing the Greek figure’s dissipating gaze falling upon his love. The use of this reference, while a tad trite, still works quite well as a thematic foundation (as it almost always does for me–no bias at all). The collision of their jointly unusual identities turns their fascination into love, portraying speech and spirit as intrinsically harmonized.
As you’d expect in a film set in the late 16th century, their love swiftly turns into marriage and parenthood. Agnes instills her connection with the nonhuman onto her three children, and Will raises them with his own literary sensibilities. The joy of storytelling is immediately shown to the audience when their youngest daughter and son swap identities to fool their mother into believing each is the other, an instantly personable and revealing segment. This moment is symbolic of Zhao’s admiration for tiny, seemingly insignificant details that reveal so much. This jump forward in time also reveals that Will is growing significantly more renowned as a playwright in London, requiring him to split his attention between his work and his family and creating an underlying tension throughout this stretch of the movie. Agnes and Will’s relationship with each other and their children culminates in tragedy, with a plague taking hold of their youngest daughter, Judith (Olivia Lynes). After a day of unequivocal struggle and torment, her twin Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe, whose performance is a genuine miracle, even though all of the children are unbelievably well-acted) wishes to take her place, embracing the sickness that has fallen upon her. He chooses to die in agony so her suffering can end. Hamnet is shown secluded in a sea of artificial, painted trees as he succumbs to his fate. His innocence is brought to the forefront as he is utterly lost and vanishes alone. This is a completely devastating sequence that sets up the questions the rest of the film tries to answer: How do you move forward from loss? How do you live?
The meaning of Hamnet is shown in how it presents the narrative and characters. Łukasz Żal, one of the absolute best cinematographers working today, chooses to highlight the fundamentally dichotomous nature of this story. Even during moments of oppressive devastation, light creeps into frame, showing the humanity of the story. The natural world is present alongside viewpoints that feel like the gazes of ghosts, yet it never feels like these two seemingly distinct visual languages are fighting for the spotlight. After the birth of Agnes and Will’s first child in the same forest where they fell in love, the camera captures Will’s stare, functioning as an omen of uncaring death, a dark chasm that has sunken into the world of life at this moment of creation.
Agnes’s connection to nature and the supernatural also gives the film a vivid sense of texture. Her nature-oriented skills—the medicinal use of herbs, her impressive falconry ability, and general knowledge of plant life—are shown as tangibly as her magical premonitions of the future and the nearly instantaneous understanding she has of the people around her. All of Agnes’s natural and unnatural gifts stem from her bond with her late mother. Even as a relatively small part of the narrative, Agnes’s abilities hover over everything, contextualizing the movie's notions of grief and parenting in another example of connecting these diametrically opposed concepts.
Agnes’s ability of discernment also connects her to Will through multiple facets of their initially independent lives. Will’s adroitness with words may give him a similar sense of interpersonal understanding when he asks, “Is it true, you know everything about a person by touching them, here?” This wonderfully unexplained mysticism permeates the film, informing its portrayal of death and our response to it.
However, there were supernatural moments that functioned to serve the plot over characterization or the theme of grief that felt unnecessary. After she gets pregnant for the second time, Agnes informs Will that she shall only be the mother of two children by the time of her death. Yet, after a complicated labor, she has twins. Fearing for her life, Agnes does everything she can to keep Judith safe. The problem isn’t necessarily the blatant foreshadowing of her child's passing, since basically everything, including the title, reveals that Hamnet is bound to die. The amount of foreshadowing doesn’t make much sense to me, but I guess it would be nearly impossible to talk about the movie—and market it—without revealing that essential plot point. The problem is that this choice betrays how the film portrayed Agnes’ connection with the inhuman. It is an unnecessary attempt to add tension to the sequence of events and trivializes Hamnet’s incredibly visceral demise in an attempt to shock the audience, as if anyone actually expected Judith would be the one to die. This small choice felt at odds with the rest of the picture, even if it didn’t do any significant damage to the deeply devastating depiction of death.
As the film culminates in Agnes watching Will’s Hamlet, the sense of sorrowful seclusion thrust upon the audience by Hamnet’s passing, as if death’s very weight is crushing us, is finally released in a sequence of pure catharsis. We follow from Agnes’s perspective as she enters an audience of theater-goers, who are characterized by their dirty, cheap looking clothes, a fascinating choice juxtaposed with how Will started compared to his current wealth. Even if the argument loses validity by actually looking into the play itself (which doesn’t matter–this is not actually about Shakespeare), O’Farrell, and Zhao by extension, interpret Hamlet as a response to the death of Shakespeare’s son. Agnes witnesses the result: the play Hamlet. Then, through a single gaze, a single movement of her hand, and a single heartwrenching yet unspeakably moving touch, the sequence is imbued with a sweeping notion of compassion and love. Everyone in the audience joins together, guided by Max Richter’s quietly profound score (and then loudly profound once “On the Nature of Daylight” kicks in).
They are all deeply moved by this depiction of grief—one informed by a genuine sense of truth. Everyone watching the play sobs and stares, supporting and holding onto each other. The spectators watching the film do the same as everyone feels catharsis. They feel that relief, and yet, they cry. They cry for each other and they sob for Hamlet, and by extension, they cry for Hamnet himself.
While watching the ending of Hamnet, you cannot separate the fundamental connection between its conception of grief and the theater-going experience. The genuine sense of communal connection that shatters individualistic-sparked dissatisfaction is absolutely crucial here. The wonderfully provocative—and innately theater-based—experience of this film makes the recent news of Netflix potentially buying Warner Bros. all the more devastating. This acquisition would be a major blow to the financial stability of movie theaters, and could nearly pulverize it entirely. While great, this film is not perfect; it functions much more as an incredibly moving emotional experience than a thorough, complex dissection of grief or the ways we channel it. There are so many perspectives here that feel underdeveloped and, at worst, borderline expository (their oldest daughter, Agnes’s brother, and Mary), and the immense emotional experience of the final sequence doesn’t give you that much to chew on besides what is directly before your eyes. Yet, even if it lacks substantial depth, Hamnet is a crucial reminder to support art and cinema. Compassion and community is vital when dealing with what we all go through–without them we are secluded, stuck with those painted trees, and alone with our grief.