Hamnet 2025
Hamnet has been making a lot of Top 10 lists for 2025, so I was glad to get a chance to see it in a theater. I didn't know what it was about exactly, but I was a little worried. It is very slow, not that interesting (to me), with a lot of family tragedy involving sick children, that would eventually sort of influence Shakespeare's Hamlet. There are a lot of big acting scenes as parents are in anguish and then again at the end when they recount parts of Hamlet. It is not a historical drama in the sense very little of this probably even happened. I'm not familiar enough with the play to really catch all the parallels to what is shown in the movie, and that is the whole point. It seems to be a well-made movie and Jessie Buckley deserves the accolades she is getting and will certainly get an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. But the plot is manipulative, what with all the sick children, often just kind of weird for no particular reason, and Buckley's character is forced to be pretty irrational at a critical time after being so level headed for most of the movie. So even while I appreciate the quality of the movie, I didn't enjoy it that much.
Written: 31 Dec 2025