Hamnet (2025)

Some of my friends have misgivings about Chloe Zhao's films. I do not, as I'd only ever seen part of Eternals before watching this. The harshest criticisms of her other films had to do with their subject matter. People objected to Eternals's role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; or, they objected to Nomadland because they found it patronizing about poverty. Hamnet is a film with seemingly neutral subject matter, so I wondered what could possibly go wrong. 

There is a scene in this film where William Shakespeare, distraught over the death of his son, runs off in the middle of the night and stands at a riverbank.  We understand he's thinking about jumping in and ending his life.  Then he recites to himself: "To be or not to be..."  This was about as silly as the bit in Interstellar when Matt Damon's character says "you have literally raised me from the dead," and McConaughey's character helpfully informs him that their mission is called "Lazarus."  

Silliness aside, this is not that objectionable.  Even so, I still had some other reservations. There is the scene where William Shakespeare and Agnes Hathaway get married. Agnes enters the chapel, center frame. We hear her thoughts in voice over: "Look at me." Cut to the back of William's head; he turns around and gazes at her. This kind of thing doesn't speak to me. To me romance is the end of Compensation. It suggests Agnes had telepathy as much as it suggests anything about their relationship. 

In that respect it does fight right in with how Agnes is portrayed in the film.  She knows all kinds of pre-Christian cures, rituals, incantations to bring out wild herbs' medicinal effects.  She alone has a spiritual, perhaps supernatural connection to capital-N Nature.  She even foresees Hamnet's death.  She prophesies that at the end of her life, two of her children will be standing by her deathbed; lo and behold, she has three children.  

The camera itself also often has a sort of ghostly quality.  It slowly pans around rooms or it stares reverently up at treetops.  Compositions are often highly mannered.  The film does not try to hide its style by making its images intuitive, so the camera's presence as some kind of transcendent perspective is felt.  

This type of spirituality does not exactly sit well with me.  But my personal issues aside, it's sort of in tension with the other major themes of the film.  

While Agnes considers her prophecies, William immortalizes their son and their grief in his play.  Agnes somewhat resents how much time William spends away from home, and is initially offended when she realizes that William has named his new play after their son.  When she finally sees the play, she's moved by the expression of grief she sees in it.

So, on one hand, the film emphasizes the parts of Hamlet that evoke the absurdity of our earthly suffering.  It's because of these parts that the play becomes a therapeutic tool for William, Agnes, and eventually everyone else.  On the other hand, the film suggests that what is happening is not absurd at all.  Agnes has foreseen it, and Hamnet even chooses his fate for noble reasons.  Everything is as it should be, even if it hurts in the moment.  Are we making our lives tolerable in an indifferent universe by imagining other lives in art, or is everything justified by some underlying spiritual reality?  

The idea that William is exorcising his sorrow in Hamlet is also portrayed in very broad strokes.  The performance of Hamlet at the climax of the film is a sort of greatest-hits reel, a montage of the play's most famous lines that relate to existential questions.  Because of this, it doesn't seem to relate to Agnes at all.  Agnes is burdened by the fact that she has grieved alone, and what the play ultimately reveals is that William has also been grieving alone.  Maybe the idea is that what wins her over about the play is that it allowed the whole world to understand what they felt for their son; but that doesn't seem to be the case, since the turning point for her is when she realizes William has "traded places" with Hamnet by casting himself as the ghost of the elder Hamlet.  

In discussing this film with my friends, I mentioned Past Lives.  That film is quite a bit different from this one stylistically, but it was another prestige film whose success sort of baffled us.  Like Hamnet, a minority of viewers had severe criticism for it, but for reasons that are hard to explain in specific terms: they found it self-important, cliched, overly mannered.  I don't dislike either film quite that much, but I feel more out of touch with the rapturous praise.