I had read and loved Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, but this felt more visceral, sitting in the darkened cinema watching the child Hamnet acting a protracted, violent death, calling out in delirium for a mother who can no longer hear him.
Those intimate with death might be reminded in this moment that, despite the euphemism “peacefully”, the going can be anything but. I badly wanted to get up and leave then, but I was with my sister and the thought of gathering my things and sending an awkward text from the foyer kept me in my seat. I ground my teeth together instead while a dull ache started in my throat.
Later on, the character of Shakespeare, played by Paul Mescal, rubs at the same spot on his own neck before breaking down in his study. I was reminded of Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files, a gorgeous Substack where he writes, among other things, about grief.
Reflecting on what he’s learned in the 10 years since the death of his son Arthur, Cave writes that “while we are all unique and special, our pain and brokenness is not”.
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Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of the novel Hamnet has been described by some (one particularly snide New Yorker piece jumps to mind) as “grief porn”. Like the pejorative “torture porn”, applied to especially grisly horror movies, it conjures spectacle, excess, an economy that incites emotional extremes – rage, lust, despair – but doesn’t care who feels them, or why, or to what end.
I don’t agree.
Hamnet joins films like Rabbit Hole and Ordinary People as an exploration of loss and its impact on the family unit, but set at a time when norms around childhood and death were starkly different from today. Maybe this is why the grief of Zhao’s film feels excessive. By pointing to a reality that was commonplace 400 years ago, and still is in many parts of the world, it punctures two modern conceits.
One is that love shrinks to match mortality rates. Hamnet (some early editions carry the subtitle A Novel of the Plague) is set when maternal and infant mortality were familiar, at a time when children were economic contributors who worked in and out of the home, not yet “priceless” in the modern sense.
But this isn’t to say that they weren’t valued or loved. This story makes space for a premodern grief that doesn’t normally get attention; arguing that if death was common, emotional bonds were shaped and perhaps even elevated by the possibility of loss. The other story – that love can be calibrated to risk or loss – is a defensive manoeuvre to help us manage the suffering of others, in the past or elsewhere, the deaths of children in war or poverty. How else could we live alongside it?
Another is that people in the past had no control over the fates of their children, but with technology and modern medicine, today we do. There’s a powerful moment in Hamnet where Agnes, who knows the uses for plants, who can heal the sick and tame wild animals, grits out that nothing will ever take her newborn child. As parents we like to think that because we love our children we can protect them.
[ Some films leave me with memories lasting for years. Hamnet will be one of thoseOpens in new window ]
Before my son got sick in 2022, I used to lie in bed with him at night, holding him and thinking, with the same kind of maternal ferocity I recognise in Agnes, that I would never let anything harm him.
If he had a nightmare I’d soothe him back to sleep and tell him that I was there. I still do this. I say the same words. The difference is I no longer believe in my own power to safeguard my child from everything.
It’s an excruciating lesson to learn, but it’s also beautiful in its way. As actor Rob Delaney puts it so plainly in A Heart That Works, his meditation on the loss of his son Henry to brain cancer, “when you’re a parent and your child gets sick or hurt, not only do you try to help them get better, you’re animated by the general belief that you can help them ... that’s not always the case.”
Watching we’re reminded that when those we love are breathing or moving around or being impossibly irritating, that it’s also incredible. Hamnet doesn’t feel like a ghoulish spectacle, then, so much as a bittersweet reminder that all love is a raw miracle, like slinging your vital organs into a carrier bag and cycling into oncoming traffic.
Some critics have accused Zhao of anachronism, reading the complexity of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a grieving father’s exercise in catharsis, because for millennials and Gen Zs, all great art must surely have a therapeutic aspect. And yet this is a story that makes a case for art as a space for shared feeling.
If we’re drawn to these images of grief right now, maybe it’s because of the collective pain we feel for what is lost – planet, democracy, community. The overused Max Richter score aside, the final scene when the audience in the theatre clasp hands feels magical. Our grief gives us a shared grammar when politics and language fail.
In the opening chapters of his memoir, Delaney asks himself why he chose to share the story of Henry’s death. Does he want the reader to hurt as he did?
Yes, in a way.
He wants us to feel something like what he felt. Not because he’s a monster, but because he “believes ... that if others felt a fraction of what he and his family felt and still feel, that they would know what this life and this world are really about.”
I had wanted to leave the theatre but I didn’t. I was glad I stayed.
