Hamnet: A Review - To Be or Not To Be?

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but very affecting movie that features a fantastic performance from Jessie Buckley.

Hamnet, written and directed by Academy Award winning filmmaker Chloe Zhao, is a tragedy that dramatizes the life of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes, as well as the alleged origins of the play Hamlet.

The film, which is based on the book of the same name by Maggie O’Farrell, who also co-wrote the screenplay, stars Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as the bard.

Hamnet hit select theatres here in the U.S. at the end of November and is in wide release still. I watched it over the weekend.

Let me start by saying that I am the ultimate target audience for this movie. First off, I am a classically trained actor…so I’ve done lots of Shakespeare, including playing Hamlet. And more importantly, how I got to be a classically trained actor fits perfectly into the thesis of Hamnet.

Here's the story…twenty-nine years ago my best friend, creative collaborator and overall partner-in-crime, Keith Hertell, with whom I had suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that accompany life as an artist in a cruel world, was killed in a car crash in Titusville, Florida.

At the time of his death, Keith and I were working a soul-crushing office job together, and he took a Friday off to fly down to Florida for a wedding. He never came back.

Due to a lack of talent and skill I am incapable of adequately expressing the devastation I felt, and still feel, regarding Keith’s death. He was the most unique, original, talented and magnetic person I have ever met. He was brilliant in a multitude of ways – a staggeringly gifted actor, comedian and musician. The most notable thing about Keith though was that he was unanimously adored by everyone who ever met him. He had an absurdly kind heart, a razor-sharp wit and an easy-going, disarming smile.

In the wake of Keith’s shuffling off his mortal coil and departing for the undiscovered country, from whose bourn, no traveller returns, I was absolutely inconsolable. I was disoriented, furious and depressed. I had nowhere to turn. Religion would have been somewhere for me to go but I was so angry at what God had done that I declared war on him…a foolish endeavour, no doubt, but fuck him…I had nothing to lose. It should come as no surprise that my war against God was an impulsive, ignoble cause and I was soundly defeated…although it took considerably longer than to be expected – anger is a remarkably useful fuel.

Then one day out of despair I picked up a paperback copy of Hamlet. I read it. In those pages I found a profound reflection of my own grief. It all made perfect sense to me now. Hamlet wasn’t crazy…he was grieving – which looks a lot like insanity to those outside of it.

I vividly remember riding the subway one day and being lost in my thoughts of Keith and having tears streaming down my face, and then remembering something hysterical he had done and laughing uncontrollably, and then weeping again…and then I sort of snapped out of it and noticed that everyone on the subway was staring at me like I was a lunatic – which I sort of was. My behavior on the subway that day was a perfect encapsulation of Hamlet. Grief knocks you out of the rhythm of everyday life, and you seem mad because you’re so out of sync with everyone, and everything, else.

Reading Hamlet, I found a dramatic rendition of my grief, which felt like profundity, if not solace, or at the very least understanding…which then gave me meaning and purpose. I set out from that moment on a pseudo-religious quest to learn as much as I could about Shakespeare’s work – not in an academic sense, but in an artistic one. I auditioned for a Shakespeare company, got in…then trained as much as I could…and ultimately went to London and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Pretty great experience born out of the most brutal experience imaginable.

Speaking of great experiences…or magical ones…I got to see Ralph Fiennes play Hamlet on Broadway thirty years ago…the best I’ve ever seen…then got to meet him – and his brother Joseph (of Shakespeare in Love fame), at RADA…pretty cool experience.

Which brings us to Hamnet. The thesis of the film is essentially that the play Hamlet was written in the deep throes of grief as a dramatic eulogy for Agnes and William Shakespeare’s lost child…which aligns with my experience of the play as grief personified.

The film is undeniably affecting, and boasts an emotionally powerful final twenty minutes that elicited from me guttural wails of grief, no doubt built up over a lifetime of heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

The problem with Hamnet though, is that despite its moving final act, the film fails to fully form in its opening two acts.

The film is up and down…a walking dichotomy. For example, it is beautifully shot but poorly staged. There were multiple times where I marveled at cinematographer Lukasz Zal’s stunning work but was frustrated by a failure to provide adequate visual coverage of the dramatic events unfolding.

Another example is that the film boasts two exquisite performances from Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, but the script never develops the characters in any substantial way to have the drama they endure be anything but window dressing for the rending of garments that comes in the final act.

Speaking of the performances, Jessie Buckley, who is nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for her work as Agnes, is spectacular in the role. Agnes is a delicious character for an actress, wild and witchy, and Buckley devours her with aplomb.

Buckley is the embodiment of primal maternal energy as Agnes…mother nature incarnate. She is grounded yet ethereal, and is aggressively compelling.

In the final act it is Buckley’s Agnes that is our avatar, and we watch the dramatic events unfold on stage through her eyes and it is a truly magical and mesmerizing experience.

Paul Mescal is not given quite as captivating a character as Buckley’s Agnes, but he makes the most of his Shakespeare role and truly comes to life when he is called upon to actually recite Shakespeare’s written words.

As previously stated, I am a sucker for anything in the SCU (Shakespeare Cinematic Universe), and while I found the final act riveting and emotionally potent, I feel like Hamnet could have…and should have…been better.

Unfortunately, Hamnet never fully coalesces into the coherent cinematic masterpiece that it obviously possesses the ability to be…and that was disappointing.

That said, I still found the film very moving, and if you like Shakespeare and like to cry, then Hamnet might be for you too. Is it as good as seeing a top-notch performance of Hamlet on stage? No. But what is?

So is Hamnet to be, or not to be? The answer is that conscience makes cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment, with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action….and so it is with Hamnet.

©2026

Netflix's The Dig is not a White Supremacy Rallying Cry

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

Netflix’s The Dig is a movie about a famous archeological discovery, not a pro-Brexit, white supremacist rallying cry

Only a woke academic could find hidden villainy in this perfectly benign and mildly pleasant British film. 

The Dig is a Netflix film starring Ralph Fiennes, Carey Mulligan and Lily James that dramatizes the 1939 excavation of an Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo that transformed our understanding of the history of early medieval England.

The film, directed by Simon Stone and written by Moira Buffini, has been nominated for five BAFTAs including for Outstanding British Film.

But not everyone is so enamored of the movie, as some see it as a pro-Brexit film espousing white supremacy.

Louise D’Arcens, a Professor of English at Macquarie University in Australia, recently attacked the film because it commits the cultural sin of  “nostalgically appealing” and “romanticizing” an “imagined continuity between Anglo-Saxons and modern British people that does not speak to the complexity of Britain today.” The horror!

D’Arcens complains the film “re-animates key tropes from the persistent British and American ideology of Anglo-Saxonism”, which she claims “was vital to underwriting white racial supremacy as a mandate for Britain’s imperial power and the expansionist concept of Manifest Destiny…”

When viewed through this distorted lens, The Dig transforms from a tame historical drama/love story into a nefarious Brexit propaganda film surreptitiously waving an ‘England for the English!’ banner.

I didn’t see any white supremacy or Brexit sub-text in The Dig, but rather an utterly banal, benign and innocuous movie examining the universality of life, death and the impermanence of things.

The Dig is one of those proficiently shot, well-acted British dramas with which we’ve become so accustomed. It isn’t great and it isn’t awful. It’s fine. It’s a middlebrow piece of entertainment geared toward Anglophiles who’ve already devoured Downton Abbey and are looking to satiate their taste for all things British.

Not surprisingly, there are numerous contradictions and illogical observations in D’Arcens’ misguided analysis.

For instance, a major narrative in the film is about class struggle. Protagonist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) is a self-taught, working class excavator from Suffolk, who is hired by wealthy landowner Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan). Their budding relationship must navigate the suffocating class structures of the time period.

The class narrative is also highlighted when Charles Phillips (Ken Stott), a pompous archeologist from the British Museum, invades Sutton Hoo, belittles Basil and ultimately takes credit for his tremendous discovery.

Yet D’Arcens interprets the Phillips-Basil clash as not being about class but rather “highlighting ongoing tensions between Britain’s rural counties and its metropolitan centre” with rural meaning pro-Brexit/bad and metropolitan anti-Brexit/good.

This assessment seems oddly regressive as it lionizes the elite (Phillips) and vilifies the working class (Basil).

D’Arcens also bemoans the film “drawing uncritically on a historical tropes of expansionism – despite the fact the violence of colonialism and occupation is well understood today.”

This is directly at odds with the disparaging appraisal of Basil as a bad guy avatar for Brexiteers. Basil is the victim of the colonialism of educated metropolitan Philips. Like countless British colonialist before him, Phillips comes to Basil’s “foreign” land of Suffolk, takes power, steals treasures and brings them back to London. Yet, incongruously in D’Arcens’ deconstruction Phillips is also a heroic symbol of anti-Brexit sophistication.

D’Arcens then writes,

“One of the great reckonings in the film comes when Basil’s wife, May, urges her disaffected husband to return to the dig. She tells him:

 ‘You’ve always said your work isn’t about the past or even the present. It’s for the future, so that the next generations can know where they came from. The line that joins them to their forebears.’

This appeal to the idea of genetic continuity is rousing and profound, but also exclusionary and insular. May assumes racial and cultural uniformity in Britain, and shared forebears for all.”

Good lord, this is in no way an appeal to “genetic continuity” or an assumption of “racial uniformity”.

A major storyline in the film is that WWII is about to begin and the survival of Britain is at stake. This isn’t about genetic continuity or racial uniformity because the ethnogenesis of Anglo-Saxons developed between migrant Germanic tribes that came to the island back in the 5th century and indigenous Britons, thus Germans conquering Britain is not a genetic or racial threat. Hell, the royal family has German bloodlines.

The existential crisis facing Britain in the film is not a racial or genetic one, it is a national one as it is their (multi-racial) nationality that will disappear if the Germans prevail, not their race or genetic line.

D’Arcens continues, “(May) speaks to the film’s 21st century viewers, many of whom would not see an unearthed Saxon as a forebear, and might rightly wonder what “future generations” the film has in mind for Britain.”

If multi-cultural 21st century Brits, regardless of their race or ethnicity, don’t acknowledge a centuries dead Saxon king as a forebear for their nation, that says more about their historical ignorance and ethnic arrogance than anything else.

D’Arcens closes by lamenting, “…as cinematic archeology (The Dig) looks far more to the past than to the future.”

Considering The Dig is a movie set in the past and tells the story of characters discovering an even older past, this is an incredibly inane climax to a wholly inadequate analysis.

In conclusion, The Dig is not a great movie, but it also isn’t a dangerous one. It’s a mildly pleasant film that will most definitely not turn you into a brutish Brexiteer or Anglo-Saxon supremacist…I promise.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021