Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, her first film since directing Marvel’s Eternals, has sparked much debate, prompting me to see it for myself and judge whether the film lives up to its Oscar buzz. I chose a quiet, rainy Saturday afternoon to watch the movie, ready to decide if it truly deserved the acclaim or if it was merely a well-packaged emotional drama aimed at awards season. Despite hopes, Hamnet quickly revealed itself as a film trapped in familiar, overly sentimental territory.
Visual Style and Musical Choices
The film opens with poetic imagery of sunlight filtering through trees, clearly influenced by Terrence Malick, whom Zhao seems to admire. However, unlike Malick’s acclaimed works, Hamnet’s visuals lack subtlety and depth, feeling more like a pale imitation than an original vision. Supporting the visuals is Max Richter’s score, which relentlessly cues the audience when to feel sadness or shock with a heavy-handed, choral crescendo. The music’s predictability detracts rather than enhances the emotional impact, reducing genuine feeling to a formulaic soundtrack.
Familiar Storytelling and Character Dynamics
Hamnet’s narrative centers on the family of William, an often-absent playwright, and his wife Agnes, who is portrayed as a mystical, earthbound mother figure. The film leans heavily on Shakespearean tragedies, including a repeated retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth by Paul Mescal’s William, a story used so frequently in cinema that its inclusion here feels uninspired. Agnes’s character embraces a spiritual connection to nature, which translates into dramatic moments such as her solitary childbirth in the forest. Yet this portrayal borders on cliché, as it aims for profundity but instead feels forced and conventional.
Emotional Manipulation Over Authenticity
The movie tries to trigger emotional responses through an array of classic dramatic elements: intense crying scenes, a vehement outburst, a sensual sequence, the death of a child, and performances echoing Shakespeare’s existential speeches. Zhao appears to design these moments specifically to elicit tears, but the emotional impact falls flat due to shallow character development—especially concerning Hamnet himself, whose brief life we barely glimpse before his death. This lack of depth undercuts the film’s attempt to make viewers truly care.
The Film’s Place Among Oscar Contenders
Ultimately, Hamnet feels like the embodiment of “Oscar bait,” crafted to appeal directly to Academy voters through a familiar emotional formula. The portrayal of nature as a nurturing sanctuary and the use of conventional grief tropes reinforce this impression, presenting the film as an accumulation of clichés rather than an innovative narrative. Despite this, Zhao manages to provoke a flicker of emotion during the finale, although it is clear this response is fostered by the movie’s mechanical structure rather than organic storytelling.
Balancing Strengths and Shortcomings
While not a complete failure as a viewing experience, Hamnet offers little beyond its predictable mixture of melodrama and surface-level grief. It falls short of the richness expected given its focus on one of history’s most significant literary figures. The film’s reliance on overt manipulation—using music, imagery, and script cues to dictate when audiences should feel—is emblematic of a tired style that feels outdated in contemporary cinema. By comparison, other recent films have provided more nuanced treatments of complex themes without resorting to such explicit direction.
What Hamnet Tells Us About Modern Awards Films
Hamnet exemplifies a kind of filmmaking deeply anchored in the mechanics of awards season success, using a predictable emotional framework to secure viewers’ tears and sympathy. Its approach to grief is blunt, delivering emotional blows with the subtlety of a toddler’s first attempts at solid food. This formulaic method underscores ongoing tensions within the industry about authenticity versus strategy in filmmaking, especially when a movie aims more to sway voters than to offer fresh artistic insight.
