Ron’s Review

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Extraordinary! I loved this. I haven’t read the book but the film was very highly recommended. Not the kind of drama I usually watch but I’m so glad I watched Hamnet. An incredible film.

Chloe Zhao and author Maggie O’Farrel have done an excellent job of visualizing a love story, a family, grief, creativity, and togetherness. The pacing was surprisingly good—I didn’t feel a minute of the over two hour-runtime. I was just in the film, in the beautiful setting, hurtling through the characters’ lives. The way the film includes breadcrumbs and foreshadowing is well paid off by a third act that had me weeping my guts out. Beautiful work.

The acting is superb. I didn’t expect it to be this good but my word, do the actors bring their A-game. Jessie Buckley is always good but she completely embodies the out-there, earthy witchy mother. Her joy for her children and her sudden inexplicable grief. An inspired performance.

Paul Mescal has been robbed of an Oscar nomination. He was so quietly devastating. Trust the Oscar voters to miss it.

I can’t get over how excellent this film turned out to be. Especially that third act. Marvellous. I loved this.

Mon’s Review

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I finally got to watch Hamnet! I read the book in the lead up to the film’s festival release. I really liked it and was equal parts excited and trepidatious about the adaptation.

I am an admirer of Chloe Zhao’s work. I’ve only seen two of her films, but they’re both fantastic, so my hopes were high.

It’s tough for me to assess my true feelings of the film. I knew what was coming and how it would be handled — because book — and yet, I found myself just short of bawling at several points during the film.

I wished the film had stayed a little more true to the book in its focus on everyone but the Bard. And yet, despite an occasionally uneven performance, that choice would have robbed Paul Mescal of rending our hearts.

Jessie Buckley is really good in this film. She has to be quirky but not too much. Restrained and yet physical. I felt she got a bit overshadowed in the final act, but she can really hold a lot of emotion to make Agnes believable.

Buckley and Mescal are so perfectly cast in this film. They have an easy chemistry, but more importantly, are effortless in their ability to show tons of love for the children in the film.

The kids are all wonderful. In the book, we get more of Hamnet’s point of view. We missed that here, but the little boy was still brilliant in the scenes he got.

I really missed them not focusing more on the twin connection. It’s not there a lot in the book, but it was there more.

I’ll say that bar the first two or three scenes, which felt plodding, the rest of the film moves swiftly. At times too swiftly. I would have liked to not feel like we were hurtling towards narrative beats.

The third act is the biggest departure from the book.

Spoilers

If I remember the book correctly, it ends with Agnes at the performance of Hamlet. She realizes that Shakespeare has written the play to swap places with his dead son. The book ends with the King in the play saying ‘Remember me.’

End Spoilers

That happens in the film too. And I was all ready for us to fade to black and bawl away, but the film continued. We get tons of pivotal scenes from the play as Agnes and Will work through their grief and live to see their son’s life in Hamlet. It was a confusing and yet really moving experience.

I may feel more critical than I’d like to about the film because I have the book in my head, but that doesn’t stop Hamnet from being utterly moving, cinematographically stunning, gorgeously edited, and fabulously performed. Well done all around.