This will contain spoilers
When a friend tells you to drop everything and watch a movie: you do it. No looking things up, no trailers, I just went to the cinema and watched Hamnet fully blind. It was such a beautiful movie that felt so human and yet so much more all at the same time.
For the non-spoiler review: It shook me to my core and the little you know about the film the better. It grasps the Tudor period so wonderfully, through the day-to-day living, home decor, all the way to the costumes. These were all well researched, and the big screen is worth it just to see the stitches of the clothing. I knew I was in safe hands the first time we meet Agnes and he sleeves are clearly detatchable. It has the most beautiful still shots of the home with chipping painted decorations all throughout the wooden beams, most likely fragments of the medieval and seeing it provided so much life and history to something already lived in. The way life is presented made me want to run away to a forest, or to be in a bustling city, or to soak in the fire of a kitchen hearth. Never take all this life for granted, hold onto small moments.
Grief is a shrowd over this film. Even the moments that are so full of life always make space for what's no longer there. Agnes holds all of this grief close, even in childbirth she calls for her deceased mother, a scene that truly broke me, and then as her children grow she fears for Judith's health, almost mourning her whilst she's still alive. Only that it was the wrong child. She tries to fight the plague singlehandedly, gathering every herbal remedy that could possibly help, using what little power an early modern woman could grab hold of. It was harrowing to watch the desperation.
And Shakespeare is almost a deadbeat dad. He was constantly running; missing the birth of Susanna and the death of Hamlet. It was almost threatening to be a film about the 'tortured artist' and yet it stood firm by Agnes' side, only highlighting Will's absence. It does not try to make him a hero. He put his grief into his play, the one that is acted out in the finale, letting him say goodbye to his child, unknowingly letting his wife see her son as the hero he wanted to grow up to be. It proves to Agnes that Will had been feeling as deeply as she has, but with a different outlet.
The globe scene itself was deeply powerful. Through it there is a statement about connecting with a character, we as an audience wanting to reach out for a character in his dying moments, making sure he's not alone. Whilst also being so much more, Agnes sees an entire theatre mourn her son alongside her, yes, they will never know his giggles or cries, but they have been moved by an appearence of him. It is the dream to see someone live on and be remembered.
On a less serious note, the plague is one of my favourite part of medical history so when plague doctors I was briefly delighted. Though it hit me what it was foreshadowing and that joy turned into a pit in my stomach. In an attempt to cheer myself up when Judith had been struck by the pestilence, I caught myself singing the plague song from Horrible Histories to see which stage of the disease she was experiencing, and yet that made hardly a dent to my emotional state. It truly shows how well a scene is written that purposeful attempts to break immersion failed.
Overall, an utterly beautiful film that deserves its oscar nomination.
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