Buckley and Mescal Deserve Better Than This Clichéd, Overlong Oscar Bait – Predictable, Painfully Slow Period Drama.
IMDb rating: 6/10
Hamnet is the kind of prestige period drama that exists solely to collect awards nominations, not to engage audiences.
Chloé Zhao takes Maggie O’Farrell’s thin premise – Shakespeare’s son dies, Shakespeare writes Hamlet – and stretches it past two hours with glacial pacing, predictable beats, and zero narrative momentum.
We know Hamnet will die. We know William will grieve. We know the play will be his tribute. The film plods through every expected station of the cross with reverent slowness, as if deliberate tedium equals profundity. It doesn’t. It just equals boredom.
Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal deliver excellent performances – Buckley’s raw grief is genuinely powerful, and Mescal captures William’s tortured guilt – but their work can’t redeem a script that mistakes repetition for depth. The story is achingly thin: grief, distance, more grief, then a climactic theater scene that telegraphs its emotional release from miles away. The pacing is abysmal, especially in the final 40 minutes, which feel like watching paint dry in period costume.
This is Oscar bait in its purest form – beautiful cinematography, impeccable craft, prestigious source material, and absolutely nothing that justifies sitting through 125 minutes of it.
6/10: Worth one watch for the performances, maybe. But best picture and best director nominations? You have to wonder what the judges were smoking.
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