Add Hamnet to your watchlist
If you've been following the ongoing awards race, you can't have escaped the fact that Jessie Buckley has been lavished with acclaim for her leading turn in Chloé Zhao's film Hamnet.
The drama – adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 historical fiction novel of the same name – sees the Irish actress take on the role of Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare who experiences unimaginable tragedy when her titular son dies from the bubonic plague.
After debuting at least year's Telluride Film Festival, early word on the film, and especially its devastating emotional impact, was ecstatic. Our own 5-star Radio Times review, was full of praise – with critic James Mottram calling it a "masterly study of loss". He added: "The finale, all set around a stage performance, lives long in the memory, making this quietly-hewn movie feel utterly wrenching."
That verdict was by no means an anomaly. The film was met with a wave of extremely positive reviews, many of which emphasised the sheer visceral nature of the grief depicted by Buckley's performance as Agnes. Meanwhile, there were many reports of cinemagoers leaving their screenings in floods of tears and needing considerable recovery time before continuing about their days.
Unsurprisingly, a glut of award nominations followed; for the film itself, for Zhao's direction, and of course for Buckley's leading turn – with Paul Mescal also picking up several nods for his supporting turn as Shakespeare (although he was snubbed by the Oscars).
View Green Video on the source websiteBut despite all this acclaim, a dissenting opinion soon began to emerge. A number of pieces surfaced that referred to the film as "grief porn" or "trauma porn", with some pundits revealing how they found it to be an exercise in "emotional manipulation". One particularly critical piece in The Independent described it as "artificial and manipulative Shakespeare fan fiction".
As is often the way with these things, a fierce social media debate kicked off in response. Aren't all films, by their very nature, in the business of manipulating emotions, one side argued. Naysayers suggested it was a lack of subtlety that was the problem, with the film designed purely to elicit a strong emotional response without handling the film's themes with more care or depth.
At RT, our own writers were divided. Katelyn Mensah, senior entertainment and factual writer, was firmly in the pro-Hamnet camp. "[I found it] emotional from start to finish," she tells me, adding that it was Buckley’s portrayal of Agnes that had especially moved her.
"What makes it so moving is that in the scenes before his death, Hamnet exchanges the illness from his sister, giving his life for hers – and to see a young child display such fearlessness stuck with me," she continues.
"It’s the raw emotion through Buckley’s portrayal from the moment Hamnet dies to the moment Agnes sees Hamlet at the Globe that carries the movie’s emotional weighting."
As for whether the film is guilty of emotional manipulation, she said that while understanding that the impact may differ from viewer to viewer, the film "doesn’t force you to feel sad about what’s happened".
"Grief isn’t linear, there is no ‘routine’ way to deal with the loss of someone, let alone the loss of a child, so there is no ‘routine’ way to respond to it when it’s presented in the arts, whether it be theatre, cinema or on television," she says.
On the other extreme, senior film sub-editor and writer Calum Baker found that while he appreciated the clear, handmade quality of the film and the work of it's set designer and cinematographer, he was frustrated that it was told in "too broad [strokes] to find any specific texture or real insight".
"For the most part, the film seemed to graft a modern emotional sensibility onto a particular (if mostly imagined) historical situation, which made it all a bit too glib for me, which was a shame as a lot of the narrative ideas were good," he explains.
Of the "would-be cathartic play performance" that serves as the film's emotional climax, Baker adds that he felt it "was built from shallow ideas and emotional conveniences". He continues: "Not once did I feel immersed, and functionally believe these events were happening to people; instead, I felt their planning, writing, staging and acting at every turn — their sheer contrivance."
Given these emotional responses to the film have differed quite so widely, I was intrigued to hear the perspective of someone with a more psychological background, particularly to get into this idea of emotional manipulation. And so I consulted Robin Banerjee, an academic at the University of Sussex, who has carried out extensive research into the emotional impact of film and TV on the public.
Interestingly, Banerjee's own response to the film had been strong.
"I was really moved by it," he says. "I thought it was really emotional. I reacted emotionally to it, and so did pretty much everybody in the cinema. It was a very powerful film, and it obviously did pull on people's emotional connections. It did kind of draw things out in terms of how people were feeling."
Regarding the accusations of emotional manipulation, Banerjee said while he considered it an "interesting take", it was not one he was inclined to agree with.
"My own perspective is that there's nothing new here, right?" he says. "Every [piece of art] draws on your emotional experiences. That's what it means to read a book, that's what it means to watch TV. I mean, that's what it's designed to do. Of course, it's designed to tap into our emotions.
"And some films are going to be doing that much more than others, and some will be intended to do that much more than others," he continues. "I feel so much content that's out there, whether it's films or books or podcasts or TikTok videos, so much of it is based on tapping into people's emotional experience, and that's how media works."
He added: "My perspective is that human beings are too complicated. It's going to be an individual experience, and what's too much for one person is going to be completely neutral, or not much of a reaction for another person. So I would be really, really cautious about putting media content into buckets and say this is over the line.
"As a psychologist, I would definitely not feel comfortable to say, 'This is over the line. It's too emotional. This is going to be too moving.' I think that would be not a smart thing to do."
Banerjee also points to the work he had previously done with RT for the Screen Test, a groundbreaking research project that was carried out in 2023 with the aim of exploring the power of television and radio in people’s lives.
"One of the things we found in the Screen Test was that there were real variations in the level of empathic connection with what people are seeing on screen," he says.
"I think those emotional responses are really, really important, and some of them are definitely more powerful than others, and some are meant to be more powerful than others, and I don't think we should apologise."
So what's the conclusion? Can art really be emotionally manipulative? And if so, is Hamnet guilty of such a thing?
Perhaps the simple answer is that looking at things through this lens is slightly missing the point. All art is manipulative to some degree by its very nature, and it simply depends on how much the individual viewer buys into the sincerity and the believability of the scenario being played out in front of them. Any number of factors can feed into that, and personal experiences and artistic preference has always meant that two different people can have entirely opposite emotional responses to the same material.
Is it really fair to dismiss someone's genuine reaction by telling them, "Aha, but you've just been manipulated into thinking that way!'
Even Baker, who had the most anti-Hamnet stance of those I spoke to, wasn't so sure we should be looking at things quite in this way.
"'Manipulation' is not necessarily the word I would use," he says. "On the contrary, it often felt rather hands-off to me, as if the filmmakers had gotten halfway through the conceptualising or the staging of a scene and given up, deciding it was merely good enough."
At this point, perhaps I should confess that though there was plenty about Hamnet I greatly admired, I myself felt a little emotionally distant from the no doubt devastating events that were happening on screen. Indeed, there are many other films in the best picture line up at this year's Oscars that elicited a more profound and strong emotional response from me, including – in different ways – both Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent.
There are a few reasons why Zhao's film didn't quite click for me in the way it did for others, not least the fact that the extremely sombre tone adopted for the whole piece felt to me almost oppressively overbearing. But again, that seems to me to be a matter of individual taste rather than anything more significant.
Perhaps then, it's best to retire the word "manipulative" – or at least be a little more selective about when we use it – when it comes to reviewing art. There are frankly better ways of articulating why something didn't work without insulting the genuine emotional responses of other viewers, many of whose reactions will be rooted in personal circumstance.
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