"Maggie O'Farrell's lauded 2020 novel Hamnet is a dense and lyrical imagining of the lives of William Shakespeare's family, full of interior thought and lush descriptions of the physical world. It would seem, upon reading, near impossible to adapt into a film. Or, at least, a film worthy of O'Farrell's so finely woven sensory spell. Film-maker Chloe Zhao has attempted to do so anyway, and the result is a stately, occasionally lugubrious drama whose closing minutes are among the most poignant in recent memory."
"While Zhao sometimes strains to sell the notion a scene in which a weeping Shakespeare stands on the banks of the Thames and speaks a snippet of the to be or not to be soliloquy is perhaps a bit over-egged she has mostly convinced us by the end. Or, at least, Hamnet has justified the bold speculation, using a leapt-to conclusion to illuminate a fundamental aspect of living."
Hamnet is a stately, lyrical film focused on the imagined lives of William Shakespeare's family and the grief surrounding the death of his son. Chloé Zhao directs with close observation of nature and human yearning, bringing compassion and curiosity to the material. The film sometimes leans toward prestige affect and misses the humbler intimacy of Zhao's earlier work, but its closing minutes deliver profound poignancy. The film advances a persuasive speculative idea that Hamlet emerged from Shakespeare's grieving, and while a few scenes strain to sell that notion, the film mostly convinces by illuminating universal loss and love.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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