Film reviews: ‘Hamnet,’ ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ and ‘Eternity’

‘Hamnet’

Directed by Chloé Zhao (PG-13)

★★★★

The “violent beauty” of Chloé Zhao’s new film “rips your soul out of your chest,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. An adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell’s 2020 novel, Hamnet proposes that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a response to the death from bubonic plague of the playwright’s similarly named young son, and the grief the movie conjures is so emotionally overwhelming that it “feels like falling in love.” Paul Mescal proves “transcendent” as Shakespeare, but the film is anchored by Jessie Buckley's astonishing performance as the dramatist’s wife, Agnes (pronounced Ann-yis), who doesn’t write but comes across as “an even more powerful creative force than her husband.”

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For Zhao, who made a superhero flick after Nomadland won 2021’s Best Picture Oscar, Hamnet is “not exactly a return to form,” said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. As we come to know the Shakespeares and their angelic children, the movie lurches from “subdued pastoral realism” to "forceful, sometimes pushy emotionalism.” I’ll admit that when the climax arrived, my eyes were “blurred by tears.” Still, that doesn’t excuse the movie for presenting one of literature’s greatest works as primarily therapy for two heartbroken parents. But Hamlet has never been just one story, said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. During the final scene, “we view Hamlet as an effort by one grieving person to reach out to another,” and “the whole thing opens up in magnificent new ways,” helping us see the play’s multiple layers. By then, Mescal has already powered two of the film’s key scenes with “some of the best acting I’ve ever seen.” Viewed whole, Hamnet is simply devastating—“maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years.”

‘Wake Up Dead Man’

Directed by Rian Johnson (PG-13)

★★★

Rian Johnson’s latest Knives Out entry “maintains the franchise’s undefeated record,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. “Another intricate, rousing whodunit,” Wake Up Dead Man hands detective Benoit Blanc his toughest case yet: a homicide that brings the existence of God into play. At a Catholic church in upstate New York, a domineering monsignor played by Josh Brolin is killed moments after stepping off the altar, and the primary suspect is an assistant priest played by Josh O’Connor. But the suspect list is long and as star-packed as usual, this time including Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Thomas Haden Church, and a “scene-stealing” Glenn Close.

Daniel Craig, returning as Benoit, “reins in his urge to chew scenery, and instead he plays Blanc as a brilliant man whose latest case also humbles him,” said Alan Zilberman in Washington City Paper. The film also gets “a huge assist from O’Connor,” who plays the younger priest as a fundamentally decent man who winds up teaming with Benoit while the pair maintain a running debate about the role of faith in their lives. The Knives Out movies are “always a good time,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. This one’s special. “It’s the darkest, scariest, and, undoubtedly, finest acted”; it “might boast the most laughs”; and it “builds to a solid and satisfying ending.”

‘Eternity’

Directed by David Freyne (PG-13)

★★

“Are we finally arriving in the promised land, where stand-alone commercial works of wit and invention can exist again?” asked Richard Lawson in The Hollywood Reporter. This new romantic comedy feels like a throwback, because it rests on a clever original idea. Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller play a husband and wife of 65 years who have recently died separately and discovered that they will spend eternity in their youthful prime. The catch: Olsen’s Joan must choose whether her forever will be spent with Teller’s Larry or her more dashing first husband, who had died in the Korean War and is portrayed here by Callum Turner.

The script gives Teller and Olsen “a relatively complex acting challenge,” said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. They have to speak like young adults of the 1950s while conveying the emotional weariness of old age, and “they both manage incredibly well, with Teller “charming in ways we haven’t seen from him.” But while Eternity is “a film of big, audience-swaying emotional swings,” its last act “doesn’t quite reach the emotional highs we expect.” Though the movie and its afterlife world-building amuse for a while, the “cooked-up complications” that delay Joan and Larry’s happily ever after “begin to grow hollow and repetitive,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. In short, “Eternity should have been 90 minutes long, with more energy and more crackpot invention than it has.”