On episode 4 we watched Hamnet, Chloé Zhao's unofficial take on William Shakespeare's marriage and the death of his son. We both walked away giving it five out of five, and neither of us expected to get hit this hard.
The hardest kind of five star
We went in knowing almost nothing beyond the trailer, and came out saying it's maybe the deepest film either of us has seen about death, grief, and finding peace. We'll admit we might be a little biased: Jeff has one son, Matt has four boys, and the idea of losing a child isn't an abstraction for either of us. It's easy to assume families centuries ago just absorbed that kind of loss more easily because it happened more often. This film doesn't let you believe that.
What struck us both was how differently Agnes and Will carry their grief. Hers spills out loud and lasts for years; his goes quiet, channeled into his plays instead. Jeff found that resentment completely believable, not something resolved in a tidy scene a few weeks later, but something Agnes carries until she finally sees her husband's grief laid bare on stage. Matt admitted he'd probably land closer to Will's side of it, keeping things more controlled, though a couple of Agnes's scenes played a little hot for his taste.
Feeling Shakespeare without understanding a word of it
Jeff has never been much of a Shakespeare guy and said straight out that a lot of the language just doesn't land for him on the page. But watching Paul Mescal deliver the ghost's lines near the end, he found himself swept up in the emotion of it without fully parsing the words, the performance alone carrying the meaning across. Matt, who actually loves Shakespeare and has been trying (so far without much luck) to get his own kids into it, had the opposite problem: he knows the language and still found the final scene almost too dense to take in on a single watch, something that asks to be studied scene by scene rather than absorbed once. Both of them landed on the same word from the play itself: remember me.
Licensed to imagine
We only have a handful of confirmed facts about Shakespeare's actual life, and Matt pointed out that's exactly what makes a film like this work. With so little on the record, there's room to build something true to the feeling of the story without claiming to be a documentary. He contrasted that with The Greatest Showman, which had plenty of real, well-documented history available and chose to distort it anyway. Hamnet earns its liberties because there's so little to contradict them.
Visually, we both kept coming back to Zhao's symmetrical, still-camera compositions, especially a scene where Will says goodbye to his son across what looks like an ordinary divide in the frame, long before either of them knows what that divide will come to mean.
Hear the full conversation, along with our Forgotten Island review and our top five Tom Cruise movies, on episode 4.