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Here is a far from exhaustive list of complaints about Hamnet, drawn from the UK and US press. Paul Mescal plays William Shakespeare with the force of a “castrated dormouse”. We should be weeping for murdered Iranians in real life instead of a long-gone dramatist’s “imaginary boy”. The film’s closing music is “Volvo advert-friendly”. “What is Hamnet . . . without a little ham?” Turning to my WhatsApp account now, friends of reliable judgment think the film “terrible” or — worse — “midwit”.
The same film, in the coming weeks, will win awards by the bushel. Five-star reviews of it could fill one of those posters on Tube platforms. Some come from critics whose views are treated as ex cathedra.
Has another film this decade so polarised clever people? Oppenheimer had faults — the portrayal of Harry Truman as a bumpkin with somehow a Texan accent — but no one lost their rag over it. Hamnet is Meghan Markle-like in its power to unhinge the otherwise calm and well-adjusted.
Perhaps this is the “vibe shift” at work: the ongoing reaction against the culture that brought us sensitivity training, victimhood as an achievement, and so on. Hamnet, conceived in woker times, might be too wet for 2026.
Well, I am mostly in favour of the vibe shift. I also buy the old Jungian line that sentimentality is a mask for brutality. Everything was set up for me to walk scoffing out of the cinema after an hour or so. Instead, Hamnet is the only film since the pandemic that I have gone to see twice. I didn’t “cry”, of course, being above such things, but it is possible that two to three millilitres of a salt-flavoured leakage escaped the general vicinity of my left eye socket.
The cynics have got this one wrong. For lots of reasons, Hamnet has the potential to outlast our era.
One is its tactility. You can feel the squelch of damp soil underfoot, the weight of a tankard in the hand. Clever of them to get Vermeer to serve as interior set designer. Of course, the risk of putting such beautiful textures on screen is that it glamorises the historical period. Hamnet avoids that trap. The film brings home the cruelty of a pre-Newtonian world in which people ascribed their misfortunes to such non-material forces as fates and spirits. (Watching the plague scenes, I have never felt angrier about the anti-science fad in our own day.) Even Mescal’s slight blandness is well-judged. From the little that has come down to us about Shakespeare, he seems to have been that strange thing: an innocuous genius.
It helps, I think, to watch the film as a non-parent. For those with children, Hamnet’s head-on depiction of their ultimate fear must seem cheap. Whereas I could veer a little from the central story and lose myself in the other relationships, such as Shakespeare’s with his mean father, whom he silences with one threat, and above all with his wife. Without stating the ages of the couple, Hamnet captures something of the effect that an older woman can have on the course of a young man’s life, even aside from the trope of sexual initiation.
If anything jars, it is that Mescal and Jessie Buckley as his wife (the film should really be called Agnes) resemble every attractive couple in today’s hipster north-east London. You keep expecting them to put down a deposit on a two-bed in De Beauvoir Square.
Still, whatever Hamnet is, it is not a melodrama. Most of the leading parts are taciturn — especially Emily Watson as Shakespeare’s tough old ma — which gives Buckley licence to rip as the bereaved parent. Even then, her howl of grief is quick. People complain about it as though she warbles on for hours. If there is a line that demarcates emotion from exploitation, Hamnet stays just onside, even if a VAR check is needed in the final scene.
That so many people vehemently think otherwise surprises me. It might say something about the turn in the atmosphere of our times, the general exhaustion with constant emotional nakedness and with suffering as a kind of trophy. I welcome that shift in the air but sense it is starting to mess with people’s judgment, that a sort of competitive cynicism is setting in. Hamnet, unlike the present mood, has a chance of being eternal.
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