There is a version of Hamnet that feels like one of the great films about loss. The final scene is evidence of that version existing, briefly and fully, before the credits roll. Agnes sits in the theatre watching her dead son’s father perform his grief on stage, encoded in the play that will outlive all of them. Her face moves through puzzlement, anger, relief and finally something that opens into a smile, and the emotional architecture of that progression, the realisation that Will was never cold or absent but simply grieving sideways, through art and metaphor rather than tears and words, is genuinely devastating. The moment where Hamnet reaches out his hand and everyone holds it carries the kind of quiet weight that reminds you what cinema can do when everything aligns.
And then you remember how long it took to get there.
Hamnet is a film you could watch at one and a half times normal speed and still receive its emotional content intact. That is not a compliment so much as an honest assessment of its pacing. The film is slow, deeply and deliberately slow, and there is a meaningful difference between slowness that accumulates pressure and slowness that simply narrates. Hamnet too often falls into the latter category. Scenes are pieced together across jumped time frames in a way that occasionally produces an untethered, unreal feeling, as though you are watching a very tasteful summary of events rather than living inside them. The emotions are being told rather than shown, reported rather than inhabited, and that distinction matters enormously in a story whose entire power depends on visceral feeling.
Jessie Buckley is phenomenal, which by now is simply a fact about the world rather than a critical observation. What she does with Agnes across the film’s different stages of grief is a masterclass in emotional specificity. These are not interchangeable sad faces. Each stage has its own texture, its own particular flavour of loss, and Buckley locates all of them with precision and total commitment. If there is any justice in the awards conversation, she will be recognised for it. She is carrying the film’s emotional credibility largely on her own, and she does not drop it once.
The central revelation that reframes everything is beautifully constructed. Hamnet swapping places with his sister Judith to prevent her death, and Will later swapping places with Hamnet in the play, creates a quiet symmetry that feels earned rather than engineered. The father who seemed emotionally absent was processing the same unbearable thing through the only instrument he had. That is a real insight about grief and about the different, sometimes invisible forms it takes in people who process through creation rather than expression. The film is most alive when it trusts that idea.
The problem is that everything leading to that final scene is assembled competently but without urgency. The emotional peaks are real. The valleys between them go on too long and feel too disconnected to build the cumulative weight the ending requires. You arrive at the climax grateful rather than overwhelmed, which is a subtle but significant difference.
Hamnet has one of the best final scenes of the year inside a film that is merely decent. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes it just makes you wish the whole thing had burned that bright.