Anyone who knows me well knows that second only to Jesus in my life is Shakespeare. Anyone who knows me really well will know that Hamlet is my favourite Shakespeare play, has been one of my favourite plays in the history of plays since I was sixteen, and that I mentally quote it at least once a day. (It’s an extremely quotable play: “Get thee to a nunnery”, “As bad, good mother | as kill a king and marry with his mother”, “Frailty, thy name is woman”, and “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” to name a few – take your pick.)

Hamnet, with an ‘n’, tells the story of Shakespeare and his wife Agnes’ (pronounced “An-yus” in 16th century England allegedly) loss of their son Hamnet, which leads to Shakespeare writing Hamlet with an ‘l’. It’s proved quite polarising film. Accusations of overacting have been levied at Jessie Buckley for screaming too much at the realisation that her child has died, a reaction that doesn’t seem particularly out of place to me. The film has also been described as “grief porn” and Mark Kermode famously labelled it “emotionally manipulative”, a characterisation I find slightly odd given that all art is by nature emotionally manipulative. No writer chooses one word over another without thought about the effect they’re trying to produce, just as no film director selects a soundtrack without knowing what emotion(s) they’re seeking to evoke in the spectator.

If it wasn’t obvious, I’m in the ‘Hamnet good’ camp. I found it a beautiful and touching representation of grief and the power of art, both for the creator in the creation of it, and for the viewer in their consumption of it. In particular, I loved how, in William and Agnes, it showed two ways of grieving and didn’t suggest that one was more valid than the other. I also appreciated that it didn’t subordinate a father’s grief over the loss of a child to the mother’s, which tends to be what I’ve seen in media depictions of parental bereavement in my life so far. While the unique bond between mother and child was shown through all of Agnes’ birthing scenes and the story is largely told through her eyes, I loved that the film demanded the viewer to see and engage with William’s grief at the loss of his son, a child who was as much as his as he was Agnes’.

When Hamnet dies, Agnes, who is with when he does, is pained in a way that is recognisably grief – she sobs, she screams, she lashes out at her husband. William, on the other hand, who is away in London when Hamnet dies, doesn’t have as strong a reaction when he returns home and finds that Hamnet has died. (Before Hamnet dies, his twin sister becomes severely sick with the plague and everybody anticipates that it is she who will die because Hamnet is still in full health as Judith’s health rapidly deteriorates.) Shortly after Hamnet’s death, William returns to London to write, which proves to be his way of grieving because what he ends up writing is one of the most influential plays of all time, about a son devastated to the point of madness by the premature death of his father. This is unbeknownst to Agnes, who chooses to stay in Stratford-upon-Avon with their children all year round and is therefore under the impression that William is writing a comedy until the days before the opening performance of the play. It’s through her viewing of the play that Agnes is first made aware of the depth of William’s own grief over their son’s death, which we viewers are already aware from following him through the process of writing the play.

I really enjoyed how Chloé Zhao depicted William’s creative process as a form of childbirth in itself, with parallels to both of Agnes’ physical birthing scenes. The agony of those births is palpable through Jessie Buckley’s screams and cries and if she doesn’t win the Oscar for Best Actress for those alone, everything is wrong in the world. For William, the process of writing and staging Hamlet is clearly one that takes a lot out of him and yet we’re given the sense that it’s something he must do, despite it being voluntary (much like how a baby must come out once it’s crowning, irrespective of the feelings of the mother). Probably the closest William gets to the physical pain of childbirth is how spent he is by the end of the scene where, with increasing frustration, he instructs the actor playing Hamlet in a rehearsal on the proper delivery of Hamlet’s famous “Get thee to a nunnery” speech to Ophelia. (By the way, I’m aware that the sweat he breaks in this scene is not even remotely close to the pain experienced by women in childbirth so please let’s not hear what’s not being said.)

William’s birthing process isn’t shown on screen to the same extent that Agnes’ deliveries of their three children are, but Zhao shows that the writing is a painful process that costs him much but must be done anyway. In the film staging of Hamlet, William chooses to play Old Hamlet, Hamlet’s father. Near the end of the film, after kissing Hamlet goodbye in a scene that’s clearly symbolic of William finally releasing Hamnet from the part of himself that needed his son to remain “alive” in order for him to write the play, William retires backstage and cries quietly to himself (acted amazingly by Paul Mescal by the way). I found both this scene and the one where he becomes increasingly aggravated by his Hamlet’s lacklustre performance powerful representations of the pain (and other associated costs) of creating art that’s deeply personal in nature.

As cathartic as it may be to birth something beautiful out or resonant out of pain, it’s also extremely painful. Writing about something that traumatised you requires that you retraumatise yourself to an extent in order to get to the catharsis you’re searching for, but for the writer, the alternative – which is to let whatever it is remain inside of you, just taking up space – is simply not viable. “I must write Agnes”, says William with exasperation near the beginning of the film, representing this idea. Shortly after Hamnet’s death, William says to Agnes that he feels as though Hamnet is not dead but simply hiding and he (William) just needs to find him, which I thought was a great metaphor for art not yet realised but desperate for its own birth.

Another thing I loved was William’s difficulty articulating himself verbally but his eloquence through the medium of theatre and the evolution of his artistic expression as the film progresses. He barely speaks any kind of recognisable English in his interactions with Agnes at the start of the film, instead communicating through grunts and monosyllables at the beginning of their relationship. As his feelings for her deepen, he begins to write Romeo and Juliet, and then after his son dies, he writes one of the most famous soliloquies in history. I found this transformation, one due entirely to intense human emotions like love and grief , such an amazing commentary on the human capacity for artistic expression. The fact that William is presented as a completely ordinary and unimpressive young man at the start of the film, written off by his father who calls his love of Latin “the putting on of airs”, made this point even more hard-hitting. (Something else I loved is that his surname is not mentioned until the last half an hour of the film when Agnes travels to London with her brother to see Hamlet and they have to tell somebody that they’re here to see “William Shakespeare”; prior to that point, he is just “William”, even though we as the audience know that he is THE William.)

The final thing I really loved about the movie was the subversion of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in the relationships between Hamnet, Agnes, and William. At the beginning of his courting of Agnes, William tells her the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and explains that Eurydice dies permanently because Orpheus looks back. The line “The rest is silence”, spoken by William at the start and then repeated at the end of the film, refers the silence following Orpheus’ footsteps as he walks out of the underworld. It’s the anxiety caused by this silence that makes him look back, causing him to lose Eurydice forever. I loved how this motif of looking back was inverted to represent a regaining of sorts rather than the totalising loss it represents in the Greek myth.

Before his death, Hamnet, who had sworn to his father before he left for London that he would “be brave” and look after his mother and sisters in his father’s absence, offers up his life for his sister Judith’s, who appears to be dying from the plague. While Hamnet waits for Death to do the exchange, which it does in the end, Hamnet lingers in a hallway that we can’t really place and he continues to appear looking backwards in this hallway at sporadic moments for the rest of the film. We later realise that this hallway is a representation of the space between life and death, and at the end of the film, when Hamnet looks back in that hallway for the final time, he sees his mother looking at him in the future (this is the scene in which Agnes is watching Hamlet for the first time in the Globe with all the other theatregoers). That this is presented to us as a vision Agnes has while she watches Hamlet being performed on stage for the first time at the end of the film presents her viewing the play as the culmination of her and William’s constant “looking back” for their son throughout the film.

I loved that where Orpheus’ looking back brought death of an eternal kind, William, Agnes, and Hamnet’s constant looking back for each other brought life from death. Hamnet is immortalised through the play (and its thousands of performances in the centuries that will follow, although William cannot know this), and through the catharsis brought about by both writing and watching the play, William and Agnes are expunged of the first type of grief they experience following their son’s death and are given entry into a different, more life-giving type of grief. That realisation seemed to me to be what was behind Agnes’ crazed laugh at the end of the film, after Hamlet dies on stage and she sees Hamnet for the last time.

I also thought this, and the whole film, was a really touching comment on the validity of the grieving process in all its various forms. The sentiment of there being an appropriate length of time to grieve a loss is depicted in the film through William’s mother’s response to Agnes’ presumed stillbirth, when, moments after the birth, she tells Agnes quite coolly that they shall give the child a Christian burial and all will be well. This feels uncomfortably and inappropriately blasé, and mirrors Claudius’ chiding Hamlet for not having moved on from his father’s death at the beginning of Hamlet, telling him “Tis umanly grief” to “persevere in obstinate condolement”. Something I found quite interesting was that rather than demonising William’s mother Mary for that comment, which visibly upsets Agnes, through another scene in the film where it’s explained that Mary lost several of her own children in childbirth, Zhao suggests that that kind of attitude is Mary’s own way of dealing with her experience of loss, insensitive or cold as it may be to others.

I loved Hamnet so much, not least because I got to see a long time favourite play given a new lease of life and it was done so beautifully. (I didn’t have too much to say about the actual performance of Hamlet in the film but I thought Noah Jupe was a goo Hamlet and Jacobi Jupe’s acting literally let me speechless so I have a very high opinion of him also.) I think everyone and every inanimate thing involved in the making of this film deserves all the Oscars, including the controversial use of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight”. Now I’m gagging to read the book to see how the story compares in written form.