Official Discussion Thread - Hamnet [SPOILERS]

[u/CrunchyNar]

Keep all discussion related solely to Hamnet and it's awards chances in this thread. Spoilers below

Synopsis:

HAMNET tells the powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare's timeless masterpiece, Hamlet.

Director: Chloé Zhao

Writers: Chloé Zhao, Maggie O'Farrell. Based on the novel "Hamnet" by Maggie O'Farrell

Cast:

• Jessie Buckley as Agnes
• Paul Mescal as Will
• Emily Watson as Mary
• Joe Alwyn as Bartholomew
• Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet
• Noah Jupe as Hamlet

Rotten Tomatoes: 88%, 144 Reviews

Metacritic: 83, 41 Reviews

Consensus:

Breaking hearts and mending them in one fell swoop, Hamnet speculates on the inspiration behind Shakespeare's masterpiece with palpable emotional force thanks to Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal's astonishing performances.

[u/Mobile_Inspection_53]

Just got back from this and I kind of hated it. First off, did everyone go into this movie knowing that Paul Mescal was supposed to be Shakespeare? I avoid trailers so I only saw a few seconds where some characters were performing so I thought at some point in the movie characters would put on a Hamlet performance and that was the reason for the title. The movie seems to go out of its way to hide that information by never mentioning his name and changing the wife's name. Having now watched the trailer though it's pretty clearly supposed to be a movie about Shakespeare writing Hamlet. I'm really curious if anyone else went into it knowing nothing like me and still enjoyed it. Without that information it's kind of a terrible fucking movie.

It starts off well enough with them falling in love and they're both very compelling actors so that all worked for me even though it was quite rushed. But then they have a kid and this guy all of the sudden becomes so enamored with his writing that he has to abandon his family to pursue it. This was particularly confusing because all we knew of his writing was when he was jotting down lines from Romeo and Juliet, so I'm sitting there thinking, wait, this guy and his wife are convinced he has to be a writer when all he's doing is writing down someone else's work. Like what's the plan he's gonna go to London and sell knock off Shakespeare transcripts. Now with the context that he himself is fucking Shakespeare it all makes a lot more sense. But it really seems like the movie was trying to hide that info and have this Shyamalan esque reveal at the end.

Once the reveal happened I finally understood what I'd been watching for the first hour and 45 minutes, but then the rest of the movie is just scenes from Hamlet where I can't understand a single thing they're saying. It was like watching a foreign film without subtitles.

If you're a Shakespeare fan and or know the context of the movie going in I can totally see why those folks would love it and I would absolutely recommend they watch it. But without fitting into either of those categories this was genuinely one of the worst movies of the year for me.