Hamnet (2025)

Rated PG-13 because the film is mostly about child mortality.  Because this is based on real events, I feel like I'm not spoiling anything by saying that one of William Shakespeare's children died young.  But the movie also has a mildly graphic sex scene without nudity.  I also want to say that the movie dances around notions of witchcraft, but that's neither here nor there.  

DIRECTOR:  Chloe Zhao

​I'm almost there, guys!  I've almost watched all the movies that I can watch before the Academy Awards.  I have half of The Secret Agent left and then I'll try to watch some of the foreign films.  After all, we're coming up on the Academy Awards this Sunday.  And I don't know how I feel getting a real contender at the end of this list.  If you don't feel like reading anymore, I can tell you that Hamnet might be the dark horse contender of the Academy Awards.

I don't know if I'm breaking any new ground here, but Neon feels like a slightly different A24.  The aesthetics of this movie feel almost like a horror movie at times, especially considering that this is a movie that personifies Death.  I want to establish the film's use of personification because I know that I would call shanannigans if I read someone else pulling that card.  There is no metaphorical death in the movie.  No one plays death a'la The Seventh Seal.  Instead, the story is told through Agnes's eyes and, by association, the children view life and death as almost corporeal.   Just to jump to the shocking moment, Hamnet saves Judith's life by tricking Death into taking him instead of his sister.  From an outside perspective, we are all aware that Hamnet probably didn't actually do anything except for contract the same disease that claimed his sister.  Judith was probably incredibly fortunate that her body was able to fight off the disease that ended up killing her brother.  But the film never really treats it from a grounded perspective.  The film tells us that Hamnet sacrificed himself for his sister and that is the assumption that the film asks its audience to make.  And it's weirdly affective.

A lot of that is probably because the film focuses so much on Jessie Buckley's Agnes / Anne Hathaway.  I do like that William Shakespeare / the husband is only a supporting character.  I almost said "minor character", but he definitely takes a backseat to Agnes.  Zhao builds Agnes to almost be a supernatural character, adding to the A24 vibes that the film gets.  Honestly, there are moments where I got The VVitch vibes.  But because we experience all of what happens from Agnes's perspective, that decision to see Hamnet's action as self-sacrificing makes the story have a deeper resonance.  If there was a moment where I wondered, "Well, he didn't have to do that.  He wasn't changing anything," the film would just be kind of silly.  But he climbs into that bed and looks his sister in the face and tells her that he's going to trick Death into coming for him.  Yes, I was mentally screaming at the screen to get out of there.  But in reality, had he not done that, I'm still in the headspace that Judith would have died.  Maybe its the narrative element and the English teacher in me, but the story wouldn't have made sense if she just got better.

I see that a lot of complaints about Hamnet have to do with the notion that it is grief porn.  Um...heavily disagree.  I've accused other movies of having that description (I feel weird writing that term) and Hamnet is not one of them.  Honestly, most of the movie feels like a celebration of life.  Honestly, I fell in love with the movie with the story of Will and Agnes / Anne.  These were two people who were unsatisfied in life and fell madly in love.  They manipulated their families to get married and for years, they had a loving situation.  Heck, there was almost something Bluey about the whole first half of the film.  (Okay, it gets more graphic than Bluey.)  But usually, we have stories about abusive fathers or distant mothers (which is what I'm reading right now in Stoner), but this is a story about two loving parents who come from different worlds.  If you didn't know that Hamnet was goign to to die, then the story would read quite differently.  (There was a moment --and I have to admit this --that I thought that this was going to be intentional revisionist history and we saw a "What If" scenario if Hamnet had lived.) Yes, Will and Anne start falling apart after the death of their child.  Yes, Will comes across quite badly because he was gone pursuing his dream.

But that's part of the story.  When Will left for London, there's this narrative that both of them are meeting each other in the middle.  Agnes comes across as this free spirit of the forest who domesticates herself for the sake of her children.  Will, in contrast, is a man who is so attached to a grounded sense of employment that he gives up his dream of writing.  But as the story progresses, the two of them find their bliss in the inspiration of the other.  Will's crime is one of not being prescient when it comes to his children's surprise illness.  Yeah, we shouldn't be thrilled that Will spends so much time away from his family.  I think my wife and I always comment when characters in stories find themselves away from their families for extended periods of time.  But I can't help but feel more than a little sympathy for Will in this scenario.  There is this need to do great things out there.  We get that Will loves his family and that he is providing.  Also, we have that historical dramatic irony knowing that William Shakespeare ends up being the greatest playwright of all time.  Still, we're watching this from a human perspective.  Most of the movie doesn't call Shakespeare by name.  I snickered during the film "What if you didn't know that this was William Shakespeare until this moment?" because his name isn't formally dropped until the last ten minutes of the film.  (Sure, the film is about a guy who writes the "To be or not to be" soliloquy.)  

The ending is the dismount.  (And other things that I thought necessary to write.)  I have to question everything I know about Shakespeare.  One of the things that I regularly tell my students is that teaching is just repeating what someone told you.  One of the ideas that has always been repeated to me when I was a student was that Shakespeare worked from common storytelling, but elevated it.  The notion that Shakespeare's audiences would have been moderately aware of the bare bones of Romeo and Juliet let them understand his loftier takes on the characters when he adapted them.  But the Hamnet / Hamlet thing always stressed me out.  I know that I'm on the outs when it comes to the beat-for-beat true events of what led to Hamnet's death.  I'm even further removed from the story when it comes to how the Hamlet / Hamnet shift happened.  I have to trust that opening slide that it is the truth. But still, I find this narrative far more interesting than the version that I had in my head.  (Also, I'm not allowed to embrace Neil Gaiman's Midsummer Night's Dream comic as historical fiction anymore.) 

But we're in this for the end, right?  The grief people who swear that this movie is all about grief probably harken to the end of the film as their key evidence to that theory.  I don't deny that the end of the movie is heartbreaking.  But it is only because we knew happiness and that happiness was taken away from us.  When we watch Agnes beg the players not to speak Hamnet's name, I understand why.  But also watching her understand her husband all the more in that sequence is fascinating.  Because the mystery of it all is that Hamlet barely looks like a story about Hamnet.  But when we see those details, it's not the story itself that is about Hamnet.  Instead, this is a story of wish fulfillment.  Will wishes that he could trade places with his son and die.  But even beyond that, Hamlet is the play that he wishes could have been for his son to play in.  That's the way that he bonded with his son, over theatre.  It's incredibly touching and to see Agnes start to get that with the version that she was was heartwrenching.  Yes, it's sad.  But it's not manipulative.  Nothing in the film fees manipulative.

So, yeah, pretty darned great.  I know that a lot of people aren't going to see it, but I adore stuff like this.  Is it a movie about Daddy issues?  Sure, but it's more about parent issues and marriage issues.  And it doesn't hurt that I love Hamlet and Shakespeare.