Everyone griefs differently. Open your heart and you shall see.
Hamnet, directed by one of our time’s greatest filmmaker, Chloe Zhao, tells a story about the emotional and painful journey of William and Agnes Shakespeare who lost their only son at such an young age. This heartbreaking experience was the main inspiration behind Shakespeare’s biggest creation, Hamlet.
Warning: Spoilers ahead! If you haven’t watched the movie yet, you might want to stop reading here.
The first act of the film focuses on the beginning of the meeting and union of William and Agnes, how their love story unfolds even with their different backgrounds and family situations. Played brilliantly by Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, we can see how strong their bond is since the very beginning that it eventually evolves to a family of three with their daughter Susanna, and then their twins, Judith and Hamlet, complete their family at last.
Having a dark history with her mother, and knowing that the daughters in her family have had unfortunate events, Agnes was too focused on her daughter, Judith, as she was worried about her health condition, and has sworn that she would never give up on her daughter. This, of course, finally has fired back to her. And the family. Their biggest fear arrived. This is when the Big Shift happened, As Susanna was struggling with herself, comes in Hamnet, who gave his life to her. His sacrifice costs his family everything. Throughout this sequence of scenes, I just wanted to take my hat off to both Jessie Buckley and Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet in the film. Both of their performances are truly unforgettable.
Starting here, it’s the beginning of grief, and here we see how each of the family members grief differently, in their own ways, that somehow cloud each other’s feelings toward each other. This whole feeling of pain, sorrow, guilt, and sadness led to the creation of Hamlet. The last act of this film is just pure masterpiece from the ensemble. They have started to choose acceptance over anger, and Agnes at this point finally come to realization, that William was just as in pain as her.
The cinematography in this film is one of the most mesmerizing I’ve seen. With Agnes’ background as someone who is one with nature, Chloe Zhao, along with cinematographer Lukasz Zal, has perfectly capture this film in such a meaningful and moving way. The nature, the forest in this film, is just another character in this film. Not only capturing the nature, but knowing that this film is full of emotions, they managed to capture each characters in a very specific way that every single one of the emotions had by them, can be felt so compellingly by us the audience. Another thing that makes the film so great is seeing each character develop from one journey to another, all those experiences, challenges, and turbulences, are written so beautifully that each character’s development feel real and natural, not rushed or inorganic.
Overall, this film deserves all the awards as it has successfully taken our emotions to this rollercoaster, and show us that grief, is indeed all the unexpressed love that we have for someone.
