Hamnet: a ‘slick weepie’ released in time for Oscar glory?

Even before its release, “Hamnet” was being touted as one of “the films of the year” and a shoo-in for Oscar glory, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture – which is not that surprising, when you consider the film’s pedigree.

It is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed bestseller and co-written by director Chloé Zhao, who won an Oscar for “Nomadland”. It unites on screen “two of Ireland’s most magnetic actors”, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. And there is a bona fide genius involved besides: William Shakespeare himself.

The drama’s central conceit is that the Bard was inspired to write “Hamlet” by the death of Hamnet, his beloved son with his wife Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway. In Elizabethan England, we are told, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable.

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‘Phenomenally powerful’

We first meet Shakespeare (Mescal) as a young man, said Matthew Bond in the Daily Mail. He’s struggling to make a living as a teacher of Latin when he comes across the “wildly captivating” Agnes (Buckley) – an “almost feral creature” who abandons her work on a local farm to fly her trained hawk and wander in the woods.

The pair fall for each other, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. But “Shakespeare in Love” this isn’t: this period drama is “earthy, grubby”. And though the Bard’s life as a writer is referenced, it is kept “low-key” – he is not forever chewing on a quill pen or anything.

The focus instead is on marriage and motherhood (and be warned, the film does not stint on the brutality of childbirth). In 1585, the couple have twins, Hamnet and Judith. When the adorable Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) is taken by the plague, it is horrifying; and the film’s final scenes – in which Agnes steals into the Globe to watch “Hamlet” for herself – are “phenomenally powerful”.

The death of Hamnet is fact. That it inspired “Hamlet” is conjecture. You may not be convinced by the theory – but that shouldn’t matter, so absorbing are the film’s performances and “visual riches”.

‘Oddly modern’

William and Agnes come across as “oddly modern”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. This is a bit jarring, but it serves to make a valid point about our ancestors being like us, only living in harsher times. For this young couple, just keeping their children alive is a battle.

Yet for all the “awful gravity” of its themes, the film has a strangely “smooth surface”. The ending may leave you sobbing, or it may leave you suspecting that Hamnet was never actually a child, but “merely a device”. There is “a fine line between a moving meditation on the death of a child, and a slick weepie released into awards season”.