Review: Hamnet – A Tragedy of Pacing
It was our wedding anniversary, a Saturday night and so naturally, we decided to celebrate another year of marital bliss by watching a child die in 16th-century England.
We hadn’t read the best-selling book , but the trailer looked like a lush, romance. A sexy period indulgence to set the mood.”_ Spoiler alert: we were wrong.
The film is the backstory of Shakespeare’s lost son and the soul-shredding grief that supposedly birthed Hamlet. It had all the ingredients for pure movie magic—provided your idea of a "magical anniversary" involves paying $25 to feel like your heart has been put through a woodchipper. I think I have had more uplifting experiences at a PET scan.
In reality? It’s a weird ride.
The beginning I’m still trying to process. The movie kicks off with for some weird reason Agnes (played by Jessie Buckley) waking up in the middle of the country side in broad daylight for and I cannot stress this enough absolutely no reason. Maybe she’s a sleepwalker? Maybe she’s just really committed to a nap? We never find out. From there it quickly moves on at lighting speed with to a first kiss and even faster to a first f***. There is little build-up. One minute they are strangers, and the next, they’re locking lips in a way that feels totally unearned. It sets the tone for the first half, which is this mix of accelerating the physical relationship at a weird speed, only to slam on the brakes for some slow monologues. I think the editor couldn't decide if it should be a music video or a stage play.
The leading man played by Paul Mescal who seems to have the same haircut since Gladiator 2 (I don't know why his haircut annoyed me), did the best he could trying to piece things together and to be the complex character he almost certainly would be.
The whole first hour feels a bit like a short film that was stretched out but also rushed. There are these massive jumps from part to part like they had a limited amount of time to tell the story and just decided to skip the connecting tissue. You get stupefied trying to figure out how the time has passed.
Then there is the birth scene. I don’t know what consultant they hired, but it looked less like a Tudor-era delivery and more like weird medieval alien science. There wasn’t even the usual grit or gore you expect; it was just bizarre. By the time I hit the 50-minute mark, I was checking my watch, genuinely wondering, “When will this thing end?”
But... the second half actually gets better.
The film spends a good chunk of its runtime teasing us with a "Choose Your Own Disaster" menu. It drops heavy hints about every possible way a life can go off the rails: Is it the Black Death? Is it a scandalous affair? Is it the soul-crushing distance of a failing marriage? It flirts with all these different flavours of misfortune before finally swiping right on to a pure, unfiltered Tragedy. Once it commits to the misery, it really hits its stride—mostly because it stops pretending we're here for the cuddles and starts focusing on the catastrophe.
I will say, the second half will probably break most people, it certainly did my wife. It’s clearly designed to, It ends up being that manufactured kind of sadness that usually guarantees a theatre full of sniffles.
At the end I was left with a mixture of relief the movie had finished much better than it had started and a thought of why did medieval jackets need cuts in the back of them? Seriously. Is it for riding horses? Ventilation? Style? I spent the credits thinking more about 16th-century tailoring vents than the plot.
The Verdict: If you can get past the weird hair, the physics-defying romance, and a very rocky first hour, there is a decent tragedy buried in the second half. But don't go in expecting the love story :-)
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 .