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‘Hamnet’ Shoots for Girl Power, Misses the Story
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‘Hamnet’ Shoots for Girl Power, Misses the Story
A movie about the Bard’s family life becomes a celebration of the quirky girl.
The women of Gen Z have done a heroic service to society by giving us a name for a hard-to-define but instantly recognizable archetype: the “pick-me girl.” She’s not like the other girls. She rejects feminine conventions for deeper, purer, more authentic modes of being—when the other girls are picking out prom dresses, she dons combat boots; when they’re applying lip gloss, she’s in flannel—all with subtle moral sanctimony. Unfortunately, our critical class has not caught up. A rapturous New York Times review of Hamnet, a new film directed by Chloé Zhao about William Shakespeare’s family life, reveals the extent to which the cool-girl fantasy still passes for depth.
In Hamnet, based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), is an Early Modern iteration of the pick-me archetype. While other women sew and pray, Agnes wanders the forest. While others submit to church and custom, she communes with animals and plants, endowed with quasi-pagan intuition. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this; it’s entirely reasonable that a grieving woman might retreat to nature. What’s annoying is how the film presents this with solemn devotion, not as one response among many, but as superior.
It’s as if “quirkiness” automatically means authenticity and moral seriousness—and as if saying so is daring and subversive, rather than one of the most overused cinematic tropes of the last several decades. We even get an “evil stepmother” to drive the point home. Propriety and social constraint: bad. Forest-dwelling, animal-whispering: good. It’s all just a little too on the nose, an opportunity for complex, psychological drama flattened into a lecture. These dynamics contribute to a persistent “main-character moment” grandiosity, as if the film is just too proud of its own idea of Agnes. Instead, I found myself wishing she would get out of the way of the rest of the story.
The Times called Buckley’s Hamnet performance “ferocious” and “astounding.” I wasn’t astounded; I was fatigued. (Nor is it Buckley’s first such turn as a character like this; it wasn’t any better in The Lost Daughter.) The pattern has become inescapable—“quirkiness” as synonymous with spiritual depth, rather than as one complicated human response among many. Once a character is “quirky,” every subsequent gesture is foregone, every scene a confirmation of what we’re being conditioned to admire. And with predictability comes something that should never surface in a story drawn from Shakespearean material: tedium.
This Agnes-obsequiousness dovetails with some of the film’s broader problems, like sentimentality overdose. Its corny, emotional cues preclude subtlety and restraint—essential Shakespearean qualities. The result, paradoxically, is not heightened emotion but dullness: when every beat is underlined and every response pre-programmed, the experience fizzles. I found myself bored, not because the Bard’s family life is dry, but because the film’s coerciveness forecloses discovery. The audience becomes domesticated—dare I say “longhoused”?—by the movie.
Compounding these issues are structural failures that make the plot hard to latch onto. The film juggles so many potential plotlines that it’s hard to tell which is central. Is it the forbidden courtship between Agnes and Shakespeare? The mystery of Shakespeare’s abusive father, John, and its intergenerational consequences? Agnes’s evolution from eremitic bird-tamer to wife and matriarch, negotiating mother wounds along the way? The ascent of Shakespeare’s career as he balances rural domesticity and urban ambition? Each thread momentarily surfaces as central, only to be displaced by another. With no arc granted the authority to organize the rest, there is no clear buildup, no sense of what emotional or dramatic resolution we might be awaiting. The effect is deflating: I eventually stopped trusting the film’s sense of pace altogether, which deepened my disengagement.
The name Hamnet evokes not only Shakespeare’s dead child but the play (Hamlet) written in the shadow of his loss—a work centrally concerned with fathers and sons, inheritance and authority, grief and moral paralysis. Yet the film gives little space to these themes, and what it does afford feels choppy. Young Hamnet remains more symbol than presence (including some goofy dream sequences); John’s abusive nature is treated as a given, part of the shorthand assumptions about masculinity that exist within the film’s logic, rather than a psychological force in Shakespeare’s art and relationship with his own children. Perhaps these omissions are meant to communicate the cruel irony that the man who would give the world its deepest language for grief was painfully absent from the child whose loss would define him, but the film never unpacks this idea with the depth and evenness it deserves.
Instead, there is an almost self-congratulatory quality to the lapse, a sense of “gotcha”: a story about one of the “dead white males” we’re so conditioned to question is triumphantly reoriented into an ode to female quirkiness. It’s not that a film about Agnes herself couldn’t be compelling (especially if she were allowed to be more complicated than a mere archetype). But a film called Hamnet raises different expectations. Evoking one of the most famous explorations of father–son grief in Western literature, it raises questions about how art is forged from loss, how family trauma reverberates across generations, and how Shakespeare transformed private catastrophe into public form. Those questions are briefly raised and then largely set aside.
Indeed, the movie intermittently gestures toward a richer, more complex version of itself. Despite the sumptuousness of the countryside scenery, the London scenes are the film’s strongest. Paul Mescal directing Hamlet leading up to a Globe premiere has a vivid immediacy. And the moment when Agnes reaches out for Hamlet’s hand, joined by the surrounding audience, is luminous and redemptive. Here, briefly, the film allows the tension between art, ambition, social convention, spousal duty, and private grief to materialize. Mescal has real presence in these scenes, and hints at the deeper drama that might have emerged had his Shakespeare—and the father–son relation the title invokes—been granted more weight.
Instead, preoccupied with its own self-satisfaction over Agnes, Hamnet flops. It offers not tragedy in the Shakespearean sense, but a cheesy pick-me exercise that takes itself too seriously—and fails to pace appropriately. Hamnet, while visually beautiful, is ultimately too taken with its own idea of spiritual death to allow its characters, or its grief, to breathe.
The post ‘Hamnet’ Shoots for Girl Power, Misses the Story appeared first on The American Conservative.
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