In Hamnet’s final scene, Shakespeare’s wife Agnes – played with a kind of restless vivacity by Jessie Buckley – goes to see her husband’s new play, Hamlet. She turns to her brother and frowns, “What are they talking about?” I mean, same, Agnes. I didn’t love studying Shakespeare at school (and we didn’t even have ChatGPT then to translate it), so I wasn’t in a massive rush to go and see a film about the death of one of Shakespeare’s children, even more so because I had a precious child of my own last year. Iambic pentameter and the worst thing I could ever imagine? No thanks!
I did not expect, then, to be sitting here telling you why that film should win the coveted Best Picture prize at the Oscars. But I am, and it should. Yes, Hamnet, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s Women’s Prize-winning novel, falls into the category of emotionally traumatising films I never want to watch again (see also: Marley and Me). But it moved me in a way that made me feel alive to the infinite, expansive possibilities of creativity, something that feels essential at a time in which our attention is farmed by algorithms and the world is on fire. It’s also a noble, deeply felt study of motherhood that feels epic, that refuses to be confined into the small, neat box of the “domestic” that these stories normally find themselves in.
