Hamnet (2025 film)

I only really went to see this motion picture because some fellow theatregoers at press night of The Olive Boy at Southwark Playhouse Borough recommended it. I found it overwrought with emotion – despite British accents, hardly anybody had a stiff upper lip, and most characters seemed to be prone to outward displays of anger or despair or depression or bereavement or some other Very Dark Feeling. Darkness being the order of the day, or rather the night, some scenes might as well have been a radio play, as it was so dark that it was difficult to see anything.

On another note, I was a bit surprised my local Curzon cinema hadn’t indulged in its usual recent practice of handing me a menu once I had sat down and then trying to persuade me to buy something from it. Perhaps somebody somewhere had finally decided it was as ridiculous and pretentious as I had always thought it to be – even when I graced the Royal Opera House with my presence one time, I just queued up at the bar like I would at any other entertainment venue. Telling me to take a seat and wait for someone to come along and take my order was just plain stupid.

Anyway, why were they all so highly emotional in Hamnet? I get the children being that way. After all, if they were raised in a neurotic environment, that is how they were taught – by example – to be. But it had the effect of leaving me very cold – both literally and figuratively: I kept my fleece on in the cinema throughout even though, to the best of my knowledge (other patrons had taken their coats and jackets off), it was room temperature in the screen. I suppose the idea might have been to give the film dramatic impact. Having seen a theatre play the previous evening where pragmatism and coolheaded thinking was the order of the day, I must admit everyone simply rolling their sleeves up and getting on with life might have been a more than a bit boring.

But it doesn’t help that there are stereotypes. William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), or ‘Will’ as he was invariably called in this film, has the kind of parents who never, it would appear, approved of his work in ‘the arts’. His father John (David Wilmot) was a glovemaker who essentially hated all his children, frequently dismissing them as useless good-for-nothings unworthy to live under his roof, complete with displays of violence and bursts of anger. Will even confides in his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) that he is terrified of becoming the sort of father his own father was, in one of the few moments that I did warm to – that he almost immediately apologises afterwards for having had too much to drink somewhat spoiled the moment. Will’s mother, Mary (Emily Watson) is one of those Christians who believes in certain standards of justice and righteousness but not those of love and forgiveness. She’d do well in the Trump Administration if she were around today. Even John tells her to rein it in. Twice. She doesn’t. Why should she? She’s right. She’s always right. Even when she is wrong, she is right.

Agnes, in hindsight, is someone I couldn’t understand and really didn’t like. Having insisted, despite reservations from her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), that the best course of action was to “send Will” to London – that is, away from Agnes and their young children – she had some nerve to later accuse Will of being an absent father! In the show’s closing scene, she talks at full conversational volume in an open air theatre, and is promptly and repeatedly shushed, which might have been the case these days, but not according to the etiquette of the time. The whole setup, in which a staging of Hamlet, including Will playing the ghost who wants to be remembered (you know the one) was therefore a total fallacy at worst. At best it was oversentimental.

After tragedy strikes, the shrieks and screams and shrills and squeals and screeches and squawks and shouts go into overdrive. “What do you know?!” the Karens will yell at me. I can’t know what it is to survive one’s own child because it isn’t something I have experienced for myself, and so the Karens (most of whom haven’t experienced it either, but that is apparently irrelevant) would rather I fucked off and died too. While being in Hamnet’s (Jacobi Jupe) company would be better than being in theirs, it’s not something I’m going to give them the satisfaction of doing until such time as the Grim Reaper comes for me as he did for Hamnet. Sorry not sorry.

A complete lack of likeable characters, then, led me to completely not like what I’d given up a portion of my weekend to see. Be still my beating heart. Oh, it is.

Two stars