Written by Alana Acosta. Header illustration courtesy of Alanna Sidlowki.
The beauty of a tragedy is how it can grasp your heart and not let go of it. It is easy to understand the appeal of horror movies. We like the thrill of letting ourselves feel fear without the actual knife falling down. It is the reason why we walk into a haunted house, sky dive, and dedicate whole plots of land for roller coasters. But to feel the sadness and melancholy that “Hamnet” offers is perplexing. It gutted my heart in the most mesmerizing way.
Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s book of the same name, “Hamnet” follows William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) in a story of love, family, and grief, as they face the death of their eleven year old son Hamnet. O’Farrell’s interest in the connection of Hamnet to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” led her to investigate the topic for many years. She would go to attempt to write the book three times until she finally did it in 2020. The grief and death that inform the book came from her personal brushes with the matter and her daughter’s ever present danger due to anaphylaxis, which is a potentially lethal allergic reaction. Directed by Chloe Zhao, the film is able to draw the viewer into a world that is both grounded and dreamlike.
From the first scene nature is established as a character of its own. Agnes has a strong connection to it and is sleeping in the middle of a forest, surrounded by trees that envelope her from above. This is just one instance where characters are made small. When they walk through the forest or meadow they are almost consumed by the beauty around them and in turn so is the audience. The music that accompanies these scenes makes the world of these characters feel so close yet so far. The serenity that nature often brings to the film is not constant. The birth scene’s use of roaring wind captures the turmoil of the scene, and by the end the whole world aligns. Everything is clearer — the birds, the insects, the trees… Similarly, the wailing and the ignorable screams of agony in certain scenes connect the audience to a grief not many can describe, the loss of your child.
At the heart of the movie stands Jessie Buckley in her role as Agnes. While Zhao does take her time to explore how William may have dealt with his pain and who he was in the family, it is Agnes’s all-consuming grief and love that tore the audience apart. Buckley embodies, and in turn is able to release, an agony that women so often ignore. With this, Zhao steps away from the silent forms of grief and pain we are so used to and instead she frees the body and allows for some of the most harrowing scene to touch the viewer.
“I’ve been making films about grief for a while. I don’t think about what’s too much or too little…[Our bodies are] restricted. Telling a woman to be quiet when she gave birth and pinning her down. We know why this control happens. But I think people are responding to films where actors are embodied, because we miss that,” director Chloe Zhao told Los Angeles Times on August 31.
Agnes better known as Anne Hathaway is like many other female figures in history a signpost in William Shakespeare’s life. Zhao and O’Farrell bring her to the front, in a story that explores how we all experience grief differently. Sitting in the theater the tears slipped out, one after another, in the deafening silence; I realized I was not the only one crying. The theater, in many ways, extended the last scene into one where we all outstretched our hearts to Agnes just as the globe theater outstretched theirs to Hamlet.
I was left wanting more. Quite uncreative commentary, but there were many little things that I wanted to see more of. Jacobi Jupe is amazing in his role as Hamnet and is able to make us fall in love with him. Yet, the time offered to explore Hamnet and his relationships with his family falls short. Likewise I wished we could have seen more of Agnes’s, and the children’s, interactions with Williams’s family during the days William is away. In the first few minutes of the movie we get to see such a distinct household and how it affects William emotionaly so much that the loss of these interactions is felt in the latter half of the movie. These quite small losses do not tear the movie down, instead it speaks to the wonderful job Chloe Zhao accomplished with this film.
With only two hours Chloe Zhao offers a journey, that at no point, lets you look away. She is able to connect us with the family Agnes and William create and offers small bits of joy and humor that accompany the family. All to take it from us in the later half. Agnes’s and William’s relationship is tested as each one deals with grief in ways the other does not understand.
“When they get together, they really complete each other and inspire each other; they have exactly what each other doesn’t have. However, when something as big as losing a child happens, the way they grieve … They can’t see each other for who they are and how they grieve,” Hamnet director Chloe Zhao told The Hollywood Reporter on September 9.
For William, art offered a way to express the grief he could not bear to show and for Agnes she heals in her ability to feel her grief without shame. In the closing moments the movie reaches out to the audience and offers tears of healing. We, the audience, have also started to heal.
