Hamnet
Published · Watched 2026-01-24
I think the fact that I’m not all that well-versed with Shakespeare, and Hamlet in particular, means there’s an aspect of this film that I’m unable to appreciate fully. I did study Hamlet at school, and I’ve seen it on stage too, but some decades later I feel none of that has stuck with me.
I probably don’t need to say it, everyone has said it already, but the performances throughout are absolutely flawless.
In any case, there are other aspects of this film that left me feeling underwhelmed upon exiting the cinema yesterday.
The characters and their relationships were largely reduced to expository bullet points, and so I didn’t feel any connection to them. Long periods of time could pass by with each scene, and you’d just be given some snippet of relationship building to work with for that whole period. There was no food for thought there for me, it was all explained in a superficial way.
This lack of connection with the characters meant the emotional cues throughout felt all too obvious, and they didn’t resonate with me. I wasn’t feeling these things alongside the characters, just being told when to feel them.
The cinematography had some nice compositions. I think maybe it’s apt that they were largely static scenes, such as you’d see on stage. I really enjoyed the cinematographer’s work in Cold War. Every shot in that film felt like art. I didn’t feel that way here.
I felt more genuine emotion seeing the video of the cast dancing in the theatre at the end of production than I did in the film’s final scene proper, whose culmination I thought was bizarre and quite unconvincing!
If it gets a physical release with a longer cut allowing it to breathe more, I’ll give it another go.
