HAMNET

It's a wise decision on Zhao and co-screenwriter O'Farrell's part to give space for the development of Agnes and Will's relationship, to see how they grow their family and begin to build their lives together, and to allow us to fully access Agnes' complex relationship with life, death and the natural world. We understand them as a couple, both as individuals (her insatiable spirit and frantic grip on life, his fiery passion and immense frustration at being undervalued) and together, a love that is insatiable and instinctual. The pull of life and death is ever-present, especially in the births of their children, first their daughter Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and then their twins Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes). In the case of the latter, death comes all the closer, with a traumatising birth where Judith is almost lost. This awakens in Agnes a deep fear for her daughter's safety and a primal determination to protect her. We see the family grow together - we see them play and argue, share in joy and sadness, see their loving bond, despite the fact that Will must disappear to London for months on end as his career as a playwright begins to take off. We are given time to sit in their happiness, made all the more difficult with the knowledge that loss is not far away.

The film offers a number of touchstones to prepare us for this eventuality, from the mythological (the story of Orpheus and Eurydice) to the natural (the loss of a beloved pet) to the circumstantial (the return of the bubonic plague that will, inevitably, claim Hamnet's life). It also makes subtle links back to the artifice of the theatre, particularly in relation to Hamnet himself. He dreams of joining his father's company of players, of pretending at sword-fighting, great quests and heroism beyond his modest home. Each of these touchstones feels almost too on-the-nose at points, and there is an awkwardness to Zhao's directorial approach to the film, as if she isn't quite sure how to put these pieces together. The same can be said of the cinematography by Łukasz Żal ('The Zone of Interest'), gorgeous yet similarly awkward, unsure of where to place figures within the frame. This often makes the film feel ill-fitting, as if it's trying to find its right shape as it goes.

When the moment of tragedy comes, a truly harrowing sequence of immense physical and emotional suffering, the film circumnavigates any kind of histrionics and delves straight into the confusion of grief. There are no emotional explosions, rather a kind of devastating, aimless wandering. Agnes has no avenue to channel her grief, and to her horror, Will's response is to flee back to London, likewise incapable of making sense of the enormity of their loss. It's probably the point where the film feels least assured in its footing, though this turns out to be intentional when we reach the final scene.

It's worth noting here how much of a technical departure 'Hamnet' is from Zhao's other films (if we exclude 'Eternals', her momentary step into the MCU), even if it shares much of the same emotional concerns. Where 'The Rider' and 'Nomadland' had a strong improvisational quality, often finding the narrative on location and working primarily with non-actors, 'Hamnet' is a far more conventional film, with a supremely talented cast working from a predetermined screenplay. There are times where Zhao fully embraces this and even allows herself to fall into the potentials for magic realism and dream logic in cinema, but others where you can feel her pushing against the restrictions placed on her by the production. This isn't to say that Zhao's direction is a misstep; more so that 'Hamnet' shows a great filmmaker expanding their cinematic language, often with great results and occasionally with awkward ones.

What holds all these pieces together is the cast, especially the central two performances. Jessie Buckley has been threatening to truly blow us all away for a while now, and in 'Hamnet', that moment has come. There is such fire, such uncompromising humanity, such primal power in her performance, a perfect compliment to Zhao's open filmmaking approach. There's a sense that she is capable of anything at any given moment, an unfiltered honesty and directness that both breaks your heart and terrifies you all at once. Not only will she likely win an Oscar for this performance, she should win an Oscar for this performance. Paul Mescal is then a perfect compliment to her, matching her on her level at every turn, yet never taking the film away from her. His is a distinctly tricky task, playing the greatest writer of all time but also wholly a flawed, dimensional human being. It is to his credit that you forget most of the time who he is playing, so connected is he with Buckley and with all the other members of the ensemble. It only strengthens my argument that Mescal is the best actor of his generation, that he gives so much space and support for Buckley to hold the centre of the film and to elevate everyone he encounters. There's also beautiful work from Joe Alwyn as Agnes' gentle brother Bartholomew and Emily Watson as Will's hard yet deeply compassionate mother Mary. Special mention must also be made to Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet, who gives a rambunctious, delicate and ultimately heartbreaking performance that resonates across the film.

Despite its occasional missteps, 'Hamnet' is a film concerned with its construction as a complete object, where it is the culmination of each individual piece that is the point. It might not have the moment-by-moment bravura of 'One Battle After Another' or 'Sinners', but I would argue that the experience of 'Hamnet' is the more fulfilling. In this sense, Zhao's film takes a similar approach to that of its producer Steven Spielberg, whose films are likewise experiences of totality rather than individual moments. It's the concern with where you leave the audience at the end, what kind of emotional experience you want to leave them with. And the emotional experience of 'Hamnet' is immense. To see each of the many threads suddenly, eloquently come together is a true wonder to behold.

This brings us to its final scene. I usually try to avoid spoilers in my reviews, but it feels nearly impossible to discuss 'Hamnet' without mentioning its ending. A warning then, if you want to see 'Hamnet' without having its final moments spoiled.

The film's conceit makes its ending practically inevitable. As you would expect, we end with the first performance of 'Hamlet', the first time this most immense of theatrical texts was spoken aloud to an unsuspecting audience. Again, I'll bring up the comparison with 'Shakespeare in Love', a magnificent film but far more obviously a melodrama than 'Hamnet'. Where the first performance of 'Romeo and Juliet' in that film is presented as a monumental event, the revelation of a masterpiece, in 'Hamnet' the birth of the play and its larger cultural impact are completely irrelevant. What matters is the immediate emotional response, partly from the audience but mostly from our protagonist. Agnes, who has never seen one of Will's plays before, only comes to the playhouse (unbeknownst to Will) to see what this play has to do with her son. We are seeing 'Hamlet' through the eyes of a grieving mother, and to begin with, the connection seems tenuous. Hamnet, her boy, was not a Danish prince avenging the death of his father. He was a little boy playing with sticks in the yard as if they were swords as if he were a brave, powerful man, terrorising his sisters and following his father like an awe-struck shadow. His was a little life, not a drama for the stage.

But 'Hamlet' is not a moment of grief for the loss of a son.

Within the film, it is something far more profound. It is a means, for Will, to unpack his grief, to comprehend and understand it - at moments, to make it manifest. The conflict between Agnes and Will in the aftermath of Hamnet's death is their inability to communicate in the face of their loss, to find the right words and actions to express how they feel. On the stage of the theatre, they find it. And the breath the film has held since the little boy died in his mother's arms begins to exhale, and something truly extraordinary begins to unfold in front of us.

As the play comes to an end, as Agnes looks around at the audience surrounding her and hears their tears at the death of this Danish prince, she understands what Will has done. He has found the ultimate expression of his grief, their grief. He has asked the audience weep for their boy. And they do. They weep for him, there on the stage. Everyone around them has stopped. The world has ground to a halt. On the boards of the playhouse and in the dust of the pit, they weep for him.

In the years following the death in 2010 of a man I loved very, very much, I struggled to find a way to express my grief. I didn't know what to do. But I had this voice in my head, his voice, a thing he would say as a joke over and over again - "If I die, you have to write a play about me." And so, in the years that followed, I tried. Every piece of theatre I directed was about him in some way, trying to make sense of his loss. It was as if he were running just ahead of me, and each production was a way of trying to catch up. In 2016, after taking many indirect routes to say what I wanted to say, I wrote a play about him. It wasn't him directly, but for those who knew him and loved him, he was there, on that stage. And the audience cried. They cried for their own loss and their own sadness, unaware that what they were seeing came from somewhere real, but they cried with him standing there. And for a moment, one brief and shimmering moment, the grief I had carried felt as enormous around me as it did in my heart.

In the final moments of 'Hamnet', I realised what that act had been, as it was in the film. It wasn't creating a monument of grief for the loss of someone beloved, but a monument of love, a love that extends to those witnessing it and filling them with the same exquisite and beautiful sorrow. And I cried. I cried and I cried and I cried, harder than I ever have in a cinema before. I cried because my heart was overwhelmed, breaking, shattered, filled with such sadness and such pain and such happiness. All those strange, awkward pieces had come together in one perfect, awe-inspiring eruption. It's one of the most powerful moments on film I've ever seen.

That is the purpose of art: to say the things we cannot say out loud, to express the things we cannot express ourselves. It is the grand, never-ending documentation of the human experience, the ongoing spiritual search for the answer to why we are here. Few films have expressed this as thunderously or as perfectly as 'Hamnet'. That it is about the greatest writer and his greatest work is irrelevant. It is about that moment of recognition and catharsis, that we have entered the undiscovered country together at this precise moment of time, in this precise moment in space, and we have come to understand something about who we are.

It is an artist saying, I give you my grief, my loss, the most precious thing I have, "the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to," and I share this gift with you that you might find your own grief, your own loss, the most precious thing you have, and we can carry that together.

And for a brief moment, those we have lost will live again.