"Hamnet"

  ☆☆ 

"Keep your heart open," exhorts the poster for Hamnet, the wildly acclaimed, careful, quiet, and deeply earnest movie that almost everyone says will wring tears from your eyes with ruthless efficiency. I kept my heart open as best I could, and I waited. Nothing happened.

I admit I had been conditioned to respond this way to Hamnet by having read Maggie O'Farrell's novel, which left my eyes equally dry and my open heart equally unmoved. And frustrated. Why had the world responded so fully and extravagantly to both the novel and the film while I sat there stone-faced?

Look, I'm the kind of person who got weepy at the end of Sinners, who sobbed in the final moments of Train Dreams. I can be reduced to a blubbering fool by some movies, and will never forget the time I couldn't leave the theater after a screening of The Bridges of Madison County because I was shaking. I like movies, I like being moved by them, I can fully submit.

But Hamnet did nothing for me except make me marvel at all the ways this exquisitely shot, finely acted film uses every trick it has to manipulate its audience. I watched it the same way some people watch a magic trick, looking to see how it's done. Clearly, a lot of people believe in the magic of Hamnet.

Does it stem from the slow, quiet, anguished way the movie proceeds? This is a film that plays everything restrained mode until someone needs to cry, scream or yell, then it lets its actors — who are all, there's no denying it, excellent, especially Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal — go wild. It's like 3-D filmmaking, where the director waits for just the right moment to turn on the gimmick. Director Chloé Zhao knows how to wield her tools, that's for sure.

Is it the spare music score by Max Richter that waits until just the right moment to unleash his own wildly overused composition "On the Nature of Daylight"? That piece is the ultimate piece of sonic manipulation, and has been used over and over to wrench tears out of audiences, regardless of what's on screen. Hamnet uses it unashamedly, and it feels, at this point, any movie that uses it should be at least a little ashamed.

Is it the emotional simplicity of Hamnet's basic story? A mother watches one of her children die. That's it. That's really the heart of it. To both the movie and the novel, it seems almost irrelevant that the mother is the wife of William Shakespeare, and that the child's name is Hamnet, which both movie and book say right up front is interchangeable with Hamlet.

Is it the story's pointed focus on the mother, to the exclusion of the father — the one whose fame is the impetus for writing the story to begin with? In Hamnet, Shakespeare is a supporting player, at best, and he's absent for almost all of the story, though the film gives him a bit more to do than the novel, ostensibly because they've cast Mescal in the role, and he needs screen time.

The structure of the story, the meaning of the story, would not change at all if the mother were the wife of a farmer or janitor or accountant. It's not until the last few scenes that Shakespeare's Hamlet factor in to Hamnet, and when they do, the tearjerking revelation that comes could just have easily stemmed from the mother randomly seeing the play.

But this is the scene that, as I understand it, makes audiences weep. Leading up to it, we've seen scenes of torture and suffering, which are mercifully briefer in the movie than the are in the book, which seems to delight in describing the enormous pain the child is in. We've seen the mother in excruciating anguish. Her name is Agnes, rather than Anne as you've always believed Shakespeare's wife was named. There is an explanation for this, though it is never spoken in the movie version and only offered in an afterword to the novel.

In the movie, this climactic scene is one in which Agnes watches Hamlet being staged at the Old Globe Theatre, and although the play is about a prince of Denmark and his father, and is about murder and revenge and takes place in a castle and not in a forest (as the stage production's background oddly depicts), and though Agnes is presented as simple and uneducated, she is moved by the play.

She is so moved that she weeps in stunned, disbelieving silence, overcome by cathartic emotion, and this is when it seems everyone who seems Hamnet becomes inconsolable. Except me, I guess. Honestly, though, I tried. I really did.

Viewed January 25, 2026

SAG Screener