"Adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 novel of the same name, "Hamnet" is an emotionally pulverizing drama that imagines how the death of William Shakespeare and Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway's only son might have inspired the creation of his greatest tragedy; think of it as "Shakespeare in Agony." And yet the violent beauty of this film, which rips your soul out of your chest so completely that its seismic grief almost feels like falling in love or becoming a parent,"
"More to the point, "Hamnet" is a wrenching story about how those two experiences - so unalike in dignity - might ultimately be catalyzed by the same process of emotional transfiguration. In the first, your heart is placed into someone else's body. In the second, that body is subsumed into the world. To create anything, be it a person or a play, is to give a piece of yourself a life of its own;"
The film imagines the death of William Shakespeare and his son as a catalyst for a great tragedy, merging the experiences of parenthood and bereavement. The emotional intensity equates seismic grief with falling in love or becoming a parent, portraying creation as placing a piece of oneself into the world. Creation and loss are framed as parallel transfigurations in which offerings gain independent lives beyond control or safety. The film adopts a lightly historical context that refuses simple alignment with Hamlet's plot and avoids reverse-engineering drama from familiar source material, favoring an unexpected, associative logic.
Read at IndieWire
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