Hamnet

It destroyed me. I already went in partly won over by Paul Mescal, from Normal People and above all Aftersun, but what ended up piercing me was Agnes, Hamnet, William's absence and that brutal idea that grief can be lived in incompatible ways even when it is born from the same love.

From the beginning, you can feel this is not going to be a light film. I felt enormous pity for Agnes very early on, because everything seems to fall on her: the children, fear, loneliness, domestic life, uncertainty and a husband who is in London, far away, even when emotionally he should be there.

Jessie Buckley is extraordinary. She has a physical and expressive presence that seems made for a character like this: earthy, intuitive, fragile and strong at the same time. She does not play pain as a pretty pose, but as something that crosses the whole body. Fear for her children, rage, tenderness, exhaustion and then emptiness become almost palpable.

Paul Mescal is also very good, because he does not turn William into a simple villain. You can get angry with him, and I did, because Hamnet dies and he is not there, and then he goes back to London as if life continued there. But the film gradually makes clear that his way of running away also comes from pain. He does not know how to stay. He does not know how to hold loss inside the house. And when we see the tiny room where he lives in London, that absence becomes more complex: he is not fleeing into luxury, he is surviving as best he can.

Hamnet's death is horrible. Truly horrible. The film first gives you that precious, almost miraculous instant with the girl, a moment of relief so beautiful that you cling to it with all your strength. And then the blow arrives. The boy dies, with Agnes almost alone before the impossible, and the film becomes devastating without needing to underline too much.

What I like most is that it understands grief as something physical and domestic. It is not only crying; it is continuing to live in the same spaces, touching the same things, looking at the beds, hearing the silences, living with absence. Agnes stays with the body of pain. William, instead, transforms it into theatre. That difference could separate them forever, but it also prepares the most powerful scene in the film.

And that final performance of Hamlet seemed incredible to me. When Agnes sees the play, when she understands that William had not forgotten Hamnet but had hidden him inside art, the film reaches enormous emotion. In that moment, for Agnes and for us, theatre becomes a form of mourning.

The scene where the actor playing Hamlet searches for hands, and Agnes also takes his hand, and the audience moves closer, cries and shares that pain, broke me. There the film does something beautiful: it turns a private tragedy into a collective communion. It is no longer only two parents mourning their son. A whole room mourns him. Theatre mourns him. Art mourns him. And that exchange of looks between Agnes and William is devastating, because they finally understand each other.

The music helps enormously. It pushes the scene into an almost unbearable emotional place, but the film has earned that crescendo. Everything before it, the illness, the absence, the distance, the rage and the misunderstanding, flows into that moment. That is why I did not feel manipulation, but catharsis. I cried because the film took me there truthfully.

I also liked that it places Agnes at the center. She is not "Shakespeare's wife" as a decorative shadow, but the heart of the story. The film looks at the creation of Hamlet from the side of the person who lost a child in the house, from the person who held life together while the genius was away. That female and family perspective gives it enormous strength.

It may have something of a prestige film, of course, and it is clear that it seeks a large emotion. But when a film makes you cry like that, when a final scene leaves you defenseless and you also feel that everything fits with what came before, arguing about whether it is calculated matters less to me. It worked completely for me.

In the end, for me it is a 10. For Jessie Buckley, for Paul Mescal, for Agnes's immense sadness, for Hamnet's death, for the way William turns his pain into a work of art, and for that final performance that transforms theatre into shared memory. It seemed to me a beautiful, horrible, cathartic and devastating film. One of those that hurt, but also explain why cinema and art matter so much.