"Understandably, the scarcity of our insight into the life of Hamnet and his family has inspired writers and artists over the years to fill in the details with their own imaginings. As an opening quote from Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt reminds us, in both Maggie O'Farrell's haunting 2020 novel Hamnet and Chloe Zhao's new adaptation of it: "Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.""
"The book was overwhelming, too, and going into a film about the death of a child, one naturally prepares to shed some tears. Still, I did not really expect to cry this much. That's not just because of the tragic weight of the material, but because the picture reimagines the poetic act of creating Hamlet. Shakespeare's play sits on the highest shelf, fixed by the dust from centuries of acclaim."
"It is about as unimpeachable as a work of art can be. And yet, here is a movie that dares to explore its inception. The attempt itself is noble, and maybe a little brazen; that it succeeds feels downright supernatural. Hamnet remains mostly faithful to the novel (O'Farrell collaborated with Zhao on the screenplay), but the two works center on different parts of the imagined timeline."
Hamnet centers on the imagined consequences of a young boy's death and its emotional aftermath within his family. The narrative connects that death to the creative impulse behind Hamlet, treating the Elizabethan play as both a cultural monument and an outcome of grief. The cinematic portrayal delivers intense, shattering emotional impact, foregrounding parental mourning and the poetic reimagining of loss. The film challenges reverence for canonical art by daring to depict its possible inception, balancing reverence and audacity. The result is a haunting, intimate study of grief, imagination, and artistic genesis.
Read at Vulture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]