Hamnet tests the line between grief and art as Oscars frontrunner sparks debate

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel, has emerged as an early Oscar frontrunner, buoyed by six Golden Globes nominations including Best Drama and Best Director. As the film rolled into mainstream theaters over Thanksgiving week, critics and audiences grappled with a central question: Is the movie a moving meditation on grief and the redemptive power of art, or a blunt, emotionally heavy portrait that brushes up against sentimentality?

The debate has become as much about form as about feeling. A Vox culture essay framed the film as a potential riddle about whether its forceful meditation on loss verges into “grief porn,” a charge that critics have wres­tled with since the festival breakout. Justin Chang, writing in The New Yorker, described the experience as elemental but acknowledged that the film’s emotional reach can feel both transformative and, at times, overbearing. In The New York Times, Alissa Wilkinson portrayed Hamnet as ardent and searing, while cautioning that certain moments veer toward a tenderness that can verges on the overly decorative. The conversation mirrors a longstanding Shakespearean tension: grief presented with immaculate precision versus grief shown in raw, unwieldy bursts of humanity.

The film’s formal design leans into a yin-yang philosophy Zhao has championed: life and death, desire and restraint, the push and pull between the feminine and the masculine. Agnes Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, anchors that balance in Hamnet. Played with unnerving intensity by Jessie Buckley, Agnes embodies the earthy, elemental, nurturing force—forests, herbs, a hawk she can tame—that stands in counterpoint to Will, the young playwright whose inner life Zhao casts as urban, cerebral, and restrained. In interviews, Zhao has described Hamnet as a story about existing in a tension between impossible polarities, and she frames the feminine consciousness she aims to revive as a central through line for the film’s emotional logic.

Will (Paul Mescal) is drawn to London to pursue his artistic growth, while Agnes remains in Stratford, connected to the forest and to the intimate world she can sustain for their children. The result, as the film pushes toward Hamnet’s death from plague, is a sequence of stark, elemental sorrow: a mother’s scream ripped from the body, the boy’s final writhing, the sense that art can be a vessel for processing a loss almost too large to name. Some viewers will read this as unflinching truth-telling about grief; others may see it as a performative intensity that risks substituting feeling for insight.

The most discussed moments inside and outside the theater echo back to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s meditation on the performativity of grief. Zhao juxtaposes the private depth of Agnes’s mourning with the public theater of Hamlet, the very play the woman travels to see in London. The dramatization is not simply an homage; it’s a test case for how art absorbs personal devastation and, in turn, extends it to an audience. The film’s most controversial choice—to have Agnes confront the stage’s meditation on death and then allow it to complete her own reckoning—has sparked lively debates about whether art heals or merely re-stages pain.

The tension between universality and individuality underpins another fault line critics hear in Hamnet. Zhao’s characters often function as archetypes, which can make their inner lives feel either vividly symbolic or frustratingly schematic. In contrast, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is celebrated for its intimate, almost microscopic portrait of a man wrestling with motives as opaque to him as to the audience. The film’s formal language and the way it folds Agnes’s feminine energy into the story’s larger metaphysical questions can feel like two different scales of emotion shoved into one frame. When the final act arrives—Agnes leaving Stratford to witness Hamlet and the audience’s collective catharsis—some viewers experience a sense of spiritual reconciliation, while others wonder if the collision of these two tonal universes dilutes the power of both.

The climactic sequence—Agnes watching a performance of Hamlet, then reaching out to the onstage Hamlet as he nears death and others around her join in sobbing—has been described by some as profoundly moving and by others as almost too purposeful, a demonstration of art’s restorative capacity that risks moralizing grief. The moment invites viewers to ask what counts as meaningful art: the intimate, private experience of sorrow, or the public, shared ritual of mourning that theater makes possible. The film’s supporters argue that the scene completes a loop: it shows grief as both a private wound and a communal act through which a society processes loss. Detractors worry that the scene can feel manipulatively utilitarian, reducing Shakespeare’s intricate undoing of certainty to a therapeutic montage.

In critical terms, Hamnet remains a potential watershed for Zhao’s career and for the year’s awards conversations. It has been praised for its emotional audacity and largely dissected for the degree to which its raw emotion is earned versus engineered. Zhao’s emphasis on archetype and polarity has been both lauded as a bold vision and faulted as a simplification of dense, personal grief. The discourse mirrors the Shakespearean argument at the core of the film: what does it mean to mourn in art, and how should art help us move beyond mourning? The answer, for many viewers, lies in the balance between truth-telling and theatrical reconfiguration of feeling.

The film’s public reception has not altered its standing in the awards race. Six Golden Globes nominations, including Best Drama and Best Director, signal its status as a major contender. Its festival reception and Thanksgiving-week expansion have kept it at the center of conversations about the season’s prestige films, even as critics debate how its approach to grief will translate into sustained recognition at the Academy Awards.

Whether Hamnet will be remembered as great art may depend on one’s tolerance for pared-down, symbolic storytelling that awash in emotion, or on whether one views the work as a necessary reexamination of how and why we seek art in the face of mortality. The film’s critics are not likely to settle the question soon, but its influence on conversations about grief, art, and the responsibilities of storytelling feels undeniable. As one observer noted after watching the film, grief remains a human constant, and art is only as good as its ability to move us toward some shared understanding of what it means to endure.

The discourse continues to evolve as more audiences see the film, and as awards season unfolds. For now, Hamnet stands as a bold, if divisive, contribution to the year’s cultural conversation—one that asks not only whether a work is emotionally impactful, but whether it can hold to the rigorous questions that art, at its best, refuses to answer in simple terms.