Hamnet

I walked into Hamnet expecting a good film. What I did not expect was to have a heavy heart and slightly teary - eyed at the end. Right from the opening frames, the film tells you something special is happening. The cinematography is just stunning. Every shot of the English countryside, the forests, the light, it all feels intentional and alive. The first part of the film is dedicated to building something really quietly beautiful: the love story between Agnes and Will, who you and I know better as William Shakespeare. But the film does not rush it. It takes its time, it moves slowly, and that slowness is actually the point. You watch them gravitate toward each other in the most subtle, natural way possible. By the time you fully feel their bond, you have earned it. And that makes everything that comes after hurt much more. Paul Mescal plays Will not as the grand intellectual figure you imagine when you hear "Shakespeare," but as someone primal, restless, and full of things he has not yet figured out how to say. And Jessie Buckley's Agnes is wild and rooted and mysterious all at once. She is someone the village thinks is a witch because she knows herbs and falconry and the forest in ways they cannot explain. But she is also deeply intuitive and maternal in a way that quietly anchors the entire film. There is something this film does really well that is hard to put into words but you feel it constantly. There is this eerie, unsettled atmosphere running underneath the whole film. Like something is about to change, or something is coming that you cannot stop. Will's sudden bursts of frustration, Agnes's silences, the way certain scenes are framed. The screenplay earns this tension, it does not manufacture it. You are alert the whole time, even in the quieter moments. When events unfold the way they do around Hamnet and his twin sister Judith, the film enters a kind of magical realism territory that is genuinely haunting. Jacob Jupe, who plays Hamnet, is extraordinary. Certain scenes where he is crying or carrying the weight of something bigger than himself, I personally got emotional watching him. Do not be surprised if you do too. What the film does not let you forget is that Will was not home when things fell apart. He was in London, building his career, and that absence creates a fracture in their marriage that Agnes carries in silence for a long time. She is angry. She is shattered. And Buckley plays all of that without needing to explain it. Their grief is shared but expressed in completely different ways, and that tension between two people who love each other but cannot reach each other is one of the most honest things the film shows you. If you are not very familiar with Shakespeare's language, the last 10 to 15 minutes might feel slightly unfamiliar, but stay with it because what Agnes experiences in that audience is what the whole film has been building toward. She walks in confused, even angry. And then something shifts on her face when she sees the actor playing Hamlet step onto the stage. In that moment, through Agnes's eyes, you understand everything. You understand why Will wrote the play. You understand what grief does to a person and what art does with grief. The film frames Agnes as your guide here, you see the play through her realisation, and it is one of the most quietly devastating scenes I have seen in a long time. The idea at the heart of it all is something like this: Will could not save his son. He could not even be there when it mattered. But through Hamlet, he found a way to keep Hamnet alive in a story that generations of people would read, perform, and feel forever. And Agnes, who had been carrying so much anger, gets to feel that too, in that theatre, in that moment. ​ It also does something rare by making Agnes the true emotional centre of the story, not Shakespeare. In a film about the man who wrote the most famous plays in history, it is the woman history almost forgot who carries the whole thing. Loved it, Had tears in my eyes. ​