Rent Hamnet (2025)

Impressive adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's meditation on loss and death - Hamnet review by PD

Rather discouraged by some of the reviews ('sentimental', 'overwrought', 'lacking the soul of the book' etc), I was a bit wary of this one, but so pleased I didn't let it stop me watching, for this is an impressive piece by a fine director.

There is of course very little we know about William Shakespeare, but one of the few things we do know is that he had a son named Hamnet, who died aged 11, in 1596 (most likely of plague, which swept the country at that time), and that three years later, Shakespeare wrote his most famous play, Hamlet. It’s this curious nugget of personal history which gave rise to Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, a rich and deeply felt meditation on loss and death, a study of how artists channel their grief into art, and which gives the spotlight to his wife, Agnes. It doesn’t feel an obvious choice of material for Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao, but she successfully transfers it to the screen with many personal touches - whereas for example the book front-loads its catastrophe with elliptical storytelling, the script here (co-written by Zhao and O’Farrell) opts for a linear approach, and this for me works very well. There is the occasional portentous omen — a rising flood, a swarm of bees — but it begins romantically and sweetly, with a bucolic meeting between the future Mr & Mrs Shakespeare. The chance encounter between William (Paul Mescal) and Agnes (the quite wonderful Jessie Buckley, who gives a soul-shattering performance) is beautifully played: she, a woman of the forest with a gift of seeing, he, a man of words, initially tongue-tied, but then wooing her with a (prophetic?) retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Both Zhao and Shakespeare share a love of the natural world, and her searching, inquisitive camera roams the valleys of both faces and landscapes.

Gently and convincingly, a portrait of life in Elizabethan Stratford is revealed, a place of craft and tradition, of clearly defined gender and class roles. Agnes’ birth scenes are especially harrowing; Emily Watson, as Shakespeare’s mother Mary, nicely represents the awkwardness of in-laws who don’t always see eye-to-eye — but also the quiet acknowledgement of pain and mortality. Just as the book was, this is a film about the strength, solidarity and sacrifice of women in a patriarchal society, and the silent moments shared by Buckley and Watson are very moving indeed. When the tragedy comes, as it must, it is devastating. The actors utterly sell the wrenching, suffocating, physical manifestations of grief, and only very occasionally do the performances feel somewhat overcooked, perhaps more theatrical than the screen requires, and for me the child actors don't quite have the necessary emotional depths required: Zhao’s efforts to elicit unselfconscious child acting, clearly encouraging a naturalistic, improvisational approach on set, also leads to some incongruous ahistorical wobbles, and the film also takes certain liberties with the history of Shakespeare’s plays, for example, suggesting he started coming up with Romeo & Juliet years before he actually wrote it.

Such quibbles however are totally banished for the heart-rending finale, when Agnes travels to London to witness a performance of Hamlet, the play, for herself; this sequence is the culmination of everything to this point, and Zhao doesn’t waste it. We watch the most famous moments of the play unfold on stage, with Noah Jupe excellent as the boy prince. Allowing Shakespeare’s beautiful iambic pentameter to do the talking, we essentially witness a collective processing of trauma unfurl in real time, and you'd have to have a heart of stone not to let the tears flow - of catharsis, of cinematic healing.

Schmaltz-fest Weepy Women's Film Based on a Women's Book. Gone with the Wind with added plague... - Hamnet review by PV

I hated this. True, this film will appeal mostly to those not in possession of a penis, but even as a piece of film-making I thought it was mediocre, by the (female BAME) director of the awful NOMAD (I turned that off after 30 minutes).

How the main actress won the Oscar and more plaudits for her overacting, her sobbing, her weeping, her predictable childbirth screaming, I do not know. Oh I do, it's because voting panels are now stuffed with EDI hires to make the female/BAME % high.

What some call a heart-rending ending I call an overblown emoporn money shot of perpetual pity party sob-fest schmaltz. I HATED it - the awful unrealistic way the Globe crowd behaves, not sure if that was in the novel. Having studied Hamlet for A-level and read all Shakespeare's plays with my degree in English lit from a top uni, I know my stuff.

Not sure if the cod-spiritual, ghostie, folk magic, woman from the woods nonsense is from the book but either way, it's silly and daft, a total distraction and all fake news, total invention, AND Will married Anne Hathaway, not Agnes. I hate most films with that cod-spiritual stuff, like GHOST or any movie featuring characters walking through a door to heaven etc. Maybe religious types like it. No idea. Thank God, I am not one of them!

Some details niggled. Back then, most wore dull clothes, brown colours, green, yellow off-white because dye was SO expensive - why royals and the church wear purple (most expensive) and red (2nd most). That did not change until teenage British genius chemist William Perkin invented/discovered synthetic dye (purple) as a byproduct of carbolic in the 1850s. WHY THEN is Anne (called Agnes here on a technicality according to the novel';s author, sigh...) mooching around the woods playing an Ophelia-type mad magic woman in a red dress? Such a dress would have been eyewateringly expensive! She mooches about at home in it too, doing the cooking and cleaning. No woman of the time would have worn such expensive red-dyed clothes in such contexts! For special occasions, sure, and the average man at the Tudor court had to bankrupt himself paying for bling, one tunic would cost tens of thousands of pounds in today's money! My old figure from 1990s is £30,000 a tunic. probably twice that now.

One plus point for not going OTT with colourblind casting - no main characters are black, thank crikey (looking at you WOLF HALL with the scene of Thomas More's execution having more black faces, crowd, executioners, nobles, than new series of Midsomer Murders, or perhaps 1964's Zulu. It is AS ABSURD as casting Ed Sheeran as Nelson Mandela!) A small number in the Globe audience are, which is possible, though perhaps not the Muslim headscarfed ones. Hamlet was written 1599-1601 when Shakespeare was 35+ and the pact between England and the Muslim world ended when the Spanish Armada was thrashed in 1588 - before then there may have been such Muslims in London, After, no. They were seen as infidels (Othello is a convert to Christianity from Islam, THE theme of that play, not his skin pigment - that is the race-fixated obsession of our age only).

It says something that the best lines here were written by Will Shakespeare himself, in the performed play at the end.

Very disappointing, I almost turned it off, but endured it till the vomit-inducing icky schmaltzy end.

FAR BETTER to watch THE HOLLOW CROWN TV drama series, let the wonderful words of Shakespeare wash over you. OR even watch 2008 TV drama THE TUDORS which I hated at first but came to love - the Ann Boleyn series the best ever depiction of her life.

Almost 1 star. 2, just.