Hamnet, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal

sick of this potato person

If you don't blink, you can see Joe Alwyn in the trailer.

This is either a picture of Jessie Buckley in the movie, or a picture of a random audience member after seeing the film.

The musical score should win Best Supporting Actor.

Looks beautiful, I'll watch this despite its bleak nature and unrelatable subject matter.

treacle.

Shakespeare doesn't appear in a good chunk.of the novel, so I wonder if the script expands the part. The book is very good, though there's a section when two characters are grieving that goes on much too long.

Buckley doesn't match the book's description of that character at all.

[quote] William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes. . .

AGNES?!?!

Will's Misses Anne would like a word with you AGNES.

*Mrs

Agnes is what Anne Hathaway was referred to in his father's will.

Hamnet director Chloé Zhao reflects on working with Paul Mescal:

[quote]He's got a weight that is bigger than his years, and you can really lean on it. Working with him, I was like, "Oh, I want to meet you so many times in my life in different ways and work together." It felt so alive. Anything was possible.

Apparently, Hathaway's father referred to her as Agnes in his will.

Shakespearing and crying!

If pronounced the French way , Agnes is a beautiful name. Anyes is the closest this non French speaking person can get.

Apparently, I didn't see R10. Sorry.

Is Paul's extra weight in his crotch?

This looks so ponderous. Who would want to sit through it?

I will never understand the praise for Jessie Buckley.

Agree r17 and I just do not understand Jessie Buckley. Third-tier chorus material.

I like Buckley; in interviews, she comes across as a bit odd - definitely not a Goop or Jennifer Lawrence type. And she's very talented.

This actually looks pretty good and definitely Oscar bait.

The thing about Buckley is everything I've ever seen her in , she always seems to be acting with a chip on her shoulder, eternally angry with the world. I don't see much ranger or variation in her performances.

I think Buckley is the finest actress of her generation - she’s absolutely extraordinary in The Lost Daughter, and was brilliant in Cabaret.

Hamnet is premiering tonight at the Telluride 2025 Film Festival.

Here's Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley arriving in Telluride before the premiere.

r22 Love her shades. Background looks like English countryside (well, maybe minus the mountains), I can't believe that's Colorado.

The premiere showing has just finished. I found two people on Twitter who attended, and these are their thoughts:

[quote] Hamnet broke my heart. Simply devastated by how deeply I felt this film. In a way, it’s a perfect film. Jesse Buckley and Paul Mescal deliver in ways I never thought possible. It really kind of broke me. 💔

[quote] david ehrlich: Hamnet aka Shakespeare in Agony. Possibly the single worst movie you could ever hope to see on a work trip away from your son who just cried over FaceTime about how much he misses you even tho you only left yesterday. could barely breathe through the 2nd half. beyond wrenching

I have no idea if these two views will be outliers or consensus. There should be real reviews on Rottentomatoes later.

Another Telluride review by an attendee:

[quote] Devastated by HAMNET. A gut-wrenching tale of the way grief pulls us apart, and how we try to pull ourselves back together again. Buckley and Mescal are astounding, and Zhao’s sensitive, naturalistic direction makes everything work. So much more to process.

Variety

Rottentomatoes reviews trickle in.

[quote] “Hamnet” isn’t just a masterful film; it’s a genuine emotional experience from a director tapping into something remarkable.

[quote] Zhao has found a way for the already talented Buckley and Mescal to pull their performances from the utter depths of their bones. The emotional release by these two actors is often arresting and akin to a dramatic faucet being unleashed on a wildfire.

And The Hollywood Reporter:

[quote] it’s Buckley who really stuns, as she evolves Agnes from the free-spirited girl of the grass to the loving wife and mother to the brittle and grieving woman. She grounds a character who could have seemed too ethereal in raw, naked feeling; there’s a moment when she screams with grief until she runs out of sound that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.

I'd ride Mescal's pinga, right infront of his outraged Agnes

Early hype always makes me nervous. Almost invariably, these films never live up to their early press expectations. The noise seems bought and paid for. I like Paul, but he hasn’t managed to quite live up to the expectations he set in Normal People. He was okay in that slight gay film he did, but otherwise hasn’t made much noise. Yes, I know he was nominated for an Oscar. His attempt at big studio action flopped. I have zero interest in Buckley. She’s basically unwatchable. I do like Zhao. Nomadland was fantastic, but she was unable to drag that Marvel dreck she did out of the swamp.

[quote] The thing about Buckley is everything I've ever seen her in , she always seems to be acting with a chip on her shoulder, eternally angry with the world. I don't see much ranger or variation in her performances.

In an early episode of Endeavour, she was just like that.

Does Agnes take a dump in a bucket in the movie?

Ugh. So much in the world is just awful now. I might just watch this movie for a hearty, cathartic cry. Or, i might avoid it at all costs since I've had enough depressing moments already, this year. Ah, decisions...

Deadline.com

[quote]Hamnet, with its quiet determination to say much about how art is affected by life, is unlike anything else and proof she (Chloé Zhao) is just about as good a filmmaker as any working today. Hamnet, with its two stars and director achieving new heights of their talents, knocked me out.

THR review that mentions how Buckley avoids the ethereal for the raw is hilarious. Buckley couldn't do ethereal if she sprouted angel's wings and a halo. Raw is all she ever does. With a chip on her shoulder.

Paul Mescal with Alexander Skarsgård at Telluride Film Festival.

Skarsgård is wearing a Gay Bikers shirt to promote the Telluride premiere of his movie "Pillion".

[quote] Looks beautiful, I'll watch this despite its bleak nature and unrelatable subject matter.

You mean unrelatable to you.

I can think of quite a lot of people who would find this material relatable.

I mean (mostly) unrelatable to homosexuals because it deals with the loss of a child. This is a gay message board, where 99% of posters are childless. Burt thanks for playing, I'm not surprised at all I have you blocked already.

*But

It appears that reviewers/audiences really respected the performances in Hamnet.

[quote] The Wrap: Buckley is nothing less than magical. She can singlehandedly break your heart with one glance or gesture and is, put simply, brilliant.

[quote] Vulture: We sometimes forget what a phenomenal actor Mescal is....In Hamnet, his response at the first sight of his dead son represents some of the best acting I’ve ever seen; it’s matched later when he interrupts a rehearsal of Hamlet’s “Get thee to a nunnery” speech and delivers it himself with such snarling self-loathing (“I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not born me!”) that he instantly and convincingly reinterprets the world’s most famous play before our very eyes. Agnes accuses Will of not grieving enough, but Mescal makes sure we see that oceans of pain lie beneath his hesitancy: He is Hamlet.

Mescal is getting across-the-board raves for this. I'm not the PM Troll but I do think he is a generational talent.

I think I read that Ham.net is the website of the pork industry???

Mescal is in Telluride for Hamnet, but he is also there to support a showing of the gay-themed "The History of Sound" with director Oliver Hermanus and co-star Josh O'Connor.

Hamnet will be showing at TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) out of competition next Sunday, September 7th. It's a bigger film festival than Telluride, so we should expect a lot more feedback/reviews after that showing. Right now, there are only 12 reviews on Rottentomatoes.

[quote]Apparently, Hathaway's father referred to her as Agnes in his will.

Nonsense. I've told you before, it's AnnE.

Garbage.

Paul IS Daniel Day-Lewis redux.

Bleak grief porn. Great, just what we need now.

Will it get Oscar nominations? Evidently.

Will general audiences pay to see it? Not bloody likely.

It is interesting that Shakespeare was not inspired by his actual grief to write a cry-your-eyes-out play, but Hamnet's author seems to have been inspired to create one of those out of his and Anne's imagined grief.

The cry-your-eyes out scenes about a father losing, restored to as if in a dream, and then losing his child again, are in King Lear. A great artist has to process strong emotions before he can render them memorably. In Hamlet grief is blocked by intellect, and that's for sure not a coincidence.

Everything about this sounds anti-fun. The cast, the plot, and even the stupid title.

No- I’m not into grief porn.

Granted, this story is some "historical imagining" (or some such thing), but what about the argument that the historical Shakespeare didn't actually write the plays, etc. I think I recall hearing on some NPR program about how the historical/real-life Shakespeare likely wouldn't have been able to worldly enough to Padua to describe Romeo & Juliet's hometown.

As far as grief porn goes, who couldn't use a good cry right about now?

The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Deadline all published rave reviews of Hamlet. However, the Hollywood Reporter found some industry insiders attending Telluride who were skeptical about the film and thought it was just a function of what provincial Telluride attendees think is great.

[quote] I would just caution that, while there are clearly many fans of the film in Telluride, I have also encountered a number of people from the industry who quietly profess to have not connected with it at all, with the term “trauma porn” coming up more than once. Plus, Telluride attendees have been known to get a bit of a Rocky Mountain high, on occasion, about films that later came back to earth — see 2021’s C’mon C’mon and Cyrano, 2022’s Empire of Light and Women Talking, 2023’s Saltburn, and yes, 2024’s September 5.

[quote] So I will be very curious to see how Hamnet plays in the weeks and months to come — its next stop is the Toronto International Film Festival, and then Focus Features will begin rolling it out in theaters Nov. 27 — when people will see it in the wake of such huge hype.

The narrative against award recognition for this film will be that it should be dismissed as "trauma porn," which has also been expressed in this thread from people who have yet to see the film, so that narrative may be easy to advance. However I don't believe Hamnet this year is C'mon C'mon from 2021, just a figment of Telluride's collective imagination.

R51, Romeo and Juliet lived in Veronai, not Padua - that's Taming of the Shrew ( or Kiss me Kate). Seriously, there is literally nothing in Shakespeare 's plays that he couldn't have got from a contemporary book - scholars have investigated his sources in exhaustive detail.

R46 Paul Mescal doesn't even reach a "Colin Farrell redux" status.

There are no descriptions of Verona (or Padua) in Romeo & Juliet, r51.

How the fuck does Mescal get away without shaving the top of his head to play this most iconic baldie??

He shaved his bush instead

Damn, that looks bleak. I don’t like Zhao’s aesthetic.

I'm not a fan of nepo-billionairess Zhao but I love Mescal & Buckley very much so I'll have to see this. And I agree -- a good tearjerker can be cathartic as hell. What even was the last good tearjerker? It doesn't feel like Hollywood even makes them anymore

[quote]what about the argument that the historical Shakespeare didn't actually write the plays

R51, That argument is totally discredited. No reputable academic thinks that conspiracy theory has a leg to stand on. You do know that rival playwright Ben Jonson wrote a poem upon Shakespeare's death? Link below. Do you reckon they chummed around talking shit about theatre for years, and in all that time he never worked out that Shakespeare didn't write, or even understand, his own plays?

Verona and Padua are no more identifiable as themselves in those plays than Vancouver is identifiable as itself and not L.A. to the vast majority of movie watchers today. And it doesn't matter in either case.

Hamnet had its Canadian premiere at TIFF yesterday, and there are more rapturous reviews posted on Twitter from some attendees. However, there are finally a few very hateful reviews on Rottentomatoes, though currently there are only 15 reviews posted there.

First the TIFF enthusiastic reviews from Twitter:

[quote] The best way I can describe it is by saying it felt like I was watching a film become a classic in real time. It was beautiful, funny, heartbreaking, and had the magical Chloe Zhao touch. Give Jessie Buckley the Oscar NOW

[quote] Hamnet blew me away. Chloé Zhao's direction felt so spiritual, like it was touched by something divine. Jessie Buckley is a revelation - this is the performance of her career. Love fills every scene of this movie. I cried so many times.

[quote] I actually don’t think there are any words to say about Hamnet. No review does it justice. Transcendent filmmaking.

Now the promised "Really Hated It" review from the Daily Beast:

[quote] Buckley and Mescal have indulged in more over-acting than any single feature should contain, she making weirdo smirky faces, he furiously pounding his fists on his desk, and the two of them emoting so hard—complete with darting glances, harried pacing, and alternately combative and loving physical interactions—that one can see the strain.

[quote] Hamnet doesn’t care about complexity; it’s primarily grief porn, dramatizing its protagonists’ agony in a manner that seeks to overwhelm the senses and, simultaneously, distract attention away from the fact that it has no insights into its chosen subject.

Other people, including others on this thread, have already predicted "grief porn" will be the narrative take-down for this film. But what we are seeing is that someone's grief porn is someone else's "Classic in real time that no review can do it justice."

[quote]The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Deadline all published rave reviews of Hamlet.

That was good of them. I was worried it was starting to struggle.

I get the impression this guy really hated it.

^ I would say that the FilmFreakCentral review was ridiculous in that it gave the film 0 out of 5 stars. Many would have given it a least 1 star for actors trying real hard or production values or music. But then I read the Daily Beast review that also appeared to trash the director, actors, and story. More reviews are needed in order to figure this out.

"Figure this out" means is it a timeless classic that will stand the test of time or is it a worthless cynical piece of trash only good for mining tears. That's quite a chasm to bridge.

This looks like a slog