Hamnet on the Awards Track: Great Art or Grief Porn?

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet has emerged as an awards-season frontrunner despite polarizing debate about what it is trying to achieve. The film, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, landed six Golden Globes nominations, including Best Drama and Best Director, and has been a persistent presence in Oscar chatter since its festival bow earlier this year. As it rolled into mainstream theaters over Thanksgiving week, critics and audiences asked whether its lyric, elegiac treatment of the plague-era death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, and the writing of Hamlet, is a moving meditation on grief and art’s power to help us endure loss — or a form of sentimentality that overreaches. The conversation around Hamnet mirrors a larger question about art’s role in processing death: can suffering be translated into universal insight without collapsing into emotion-for-emotion’s-sake?

Critical responses have run the gamut from rapture to wary skepticism. In The New Yorker, Justin Chang framed the film as something elemental and emotionally arresting, yet asked whether the spectacle might constitute “grief porn.” He described watching the film with tears that both eroded his skepticism and reopened it. The New York Times’ Alissa Wilkinson offered a very different tone: Hamnet is “ardent and searing and brimming with emotion,” yet she cautioned that such heat can verge on sentimentality. “The parts of the film that feel beautifully full to overflowing are undercut, occasionally, by feelings of just a little too much, a shot or directorial choice that’s just a tad too precious.”

The film’s formal approach leans on binary tensions that Zhao has described as central to her work: life and death, to be or not to be, grief anchored in the past but pulled forward by time. Agnes Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, serves as the film’s feminine counterweight to Will, a portrayal that Jessie Buckley renders with unnerving intensity. The forest setting, the hawk, and Agnes’s herbal lore invest Hamnet with an earthy magic that signals not merely an emotional response but a philosophical one. Will, rendered by Paul Mescal as urban and cerebral, embodies the other side of the coin: art, civilization, and the restraint of intellect. Taken together, the characters become archetypes moving within a yin-yang frame rather than strictly individualized figures, inviting viewers to experience grief as a shared, almost mythic event.

That symbolic layering is precisely where some critics sense a double-edged sword. Zhao has spoken of “existing in the tension between impossible polarities,” and Hamnet emphasizes a feminine consciousness, rooted in Agnes, as a counterweight to masculine intellect and public art. The result, in practice, can feel both profound and evasive: a heightened emotional experience that occasionally strands its characters in broad strokes. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, by contrast, is celebrated for its intimate, brutally specific portrayal of a self torn by doubt, anger, and a self-conscious performance of grief. Stephen Greenblatt, the Shakespeare scholar cited in discussions of the film, notes that Hamlet’s motives and madness reveal a self that is fundamentally opaque to others and, at times, to himself. The film’s juxtaposition of Hamnet and Hamlet thus becomes a study in two kinds of grief: the universal stage of tragedy and the stubborn, particular pull of a personal story.

The film’s narrative pivots around the moment of Hamnet’s death, a scene rendered with naked fidelity that has been described by some as devastatingly effective and by others as almost bluntly harrowing. The next act — Agnes’s confrontation with loss, and her eventual encounter with a London theatre rendering Hamlet — is meant to dramatize how art can salvage meaning from pain. The moment in which Agnes reaches out to the actor playing Hamlet and the audience follows, is intended as a communal act of mourning: the belief that the stage can translate raw sorrow into something shareable and legible. Yet not all viewers are comfortable with the tonal leap from a family tragedy to the world of public theatre, and some critics worry that the film’s culminating faith in art as a healing instrument risks reducing the complexity of grief to a single, usable takeaway.

In the end, Hamnet’s ambition is to make the audience feel grief in a way that binds personal sorrow to a larger cultural archive. Its strength, critics concede, lies in the film’s ability to locate universal emotion within a singular, intensely felt story. Its weakness may be that, in trying to fuse intimate pain with a grand theatrical project, it sometimes appears to trade nuance for intensity. The question of whether such intensity constitutes “great art” rather than an especially powerful but imperfect meditation remains unresolved, and likely will for some time. The film already has the award-season scaffolding it seeks: a slate of nominations and the afterglow of festival acclaim that keeps it squarely in the conversation. Whether Hamnet’s emotional reach translates into sustained critical consensus or into debates about taste and restraint is a story that will unfold as awards season continues.

As awards chatter continues, viewers and critics alike will weigh whether Hamnet’s emotional force is its ultimate strength or a potential barrier to broader resonance. The film’s embrace of raw grief — and its insistence that art can, in some measure, redeem even the most harrowing human experience — remains a provocative, if contentious, argument about what cinema can do in the face of loss. The discussion around Hamnet reflects a larger, ongoing conversation about the function of art in times of collective sorrow: does it illuminate the human condition, or does it push too hard on the boundaries between spectacle and sincerity?

Update, December 15, 1:45 pm ET: This piece was updated to include mention of Hamnet’s award nominations.