{"id":33003,"date":"2025-08-30T14:09:03","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T14:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/33003\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T14:09:03","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T14:09:03","slug":"jessie-buckley-delivers-emotionally-devastating-turn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/33003\/","title":{"rendered":"Jessie Buckley Delivers Emotionally Devastating Turn"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBy some perverse coincidence, this year at the Telluride Film Festival<\/a>, there were three movies about William Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cHamlet,\u201d but it\u2019s the one spelled with the \u201cN\u201d that confronts the specter of death most profoundly \u2014 and packs the greatest catharsis in the process.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs conceived by \u201cNomadland\u201d director Chlo\u00e9 Zhao, \u201cHamnet<\/a>\u201d is so emotionally raw as to be almost excruciating at times, featuring a heroic performance from Jessie Buckley<\/a> as Shakespeare\u2019s wife and the mother of his children \u2014 although as presented, she could be the mother of us all \u2014 the grounded, near-shamanic spirit forced to confront the death of her son, Hamnet. Meanwhile, Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare, who pours his grief into \u201cthe Danish play,\u201d but both the actor and character are eclipsed by the feminine elements of this story.<\/p>\n

\n\tHere, I\u2019m thinking about a conversation I had with its creator a couple of years ago. \u201cThe Rider\u201d is my favorite film of the last decade, and Zhao\u2019s outlook on life, the universe and everything has expanded my own. We were talking about the filmmaker Agn\u00e8s Varda, and Zhao pointed out the way the masculine and feminine forces in our world is completely out of balance. \u201cIt\u2019s got nothing to do with gender,\u201d Zhao told me. She was referring to energy: Civilization is masculine, nature is feminine. \u201cWe as an industry are built on celebrating masculine qualities in storytelling and in life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThere exists a collective fear of the things we don\u2019t understand: oceans, forests and our feminine side \u2014 our shadow side. \u201cHamnet\u201d is Zhao\u2019s attempt to balance that, all at once, in a single film, and I\u2019m not sure the world is ready for it. Heck, I\u2019m not even sure Zhao was ready for it, but it\u2019s a beautiful, radical, dangerous act, adapted from the novel by Maggie O\u2019Farrell (with the author credited as Zhao\u2019s co-writer), that speaks to a part of each and every one of us that we\u2019ve been taught to distrust.<\/p>\n

\n\tOf course she would choose a lyrical, Terrence Malick-like style to tell this story, about the love story between the young bard-to-be and Agnes, the free-spirited daughter of a forest witch \u2014 the roles played by Mescal and Buckley, respectively. (How perfect is it that the earth mother is named Agnes here, instead of Anne Hathaway?) Malick is perhaps the most feminine director of all \u2014 a man in touch with his spiritual side, whose camera swirls to capture the world that surrounds the characters. Actors who\u2019ve worked with him describe how they\u2019ll be on set, ready to shoot, and Malick can be easily distracted by a bird or some other animal. That sensibility is there in all his films, as far back as \u201cBadlands.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHamnet\u201d opens with Agnes curled in the fetal position at the base of a tree \u2014 the Tree of Life \u2014 as if held in the embrace of its roots. The movie is loaded with symbols, some recognizable, others ones that Zhao may be introducing into cinematic lexicon. She introduces William Shakespeare indoors, framed behind rectangular windows. He\u2019s working as a Latin teacher to pay off his father\u2019s debts, but he\u2019s drawn to Agnes\u2019 energy \u2014 or maybe it\u2019s Buckley\u2019s, as the actor has shown a fierce, rebellious, untamable spirit since the 2018 role that put her on the map, \u201cWild Rose.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWilliam falls immediately, madly in love with Agnes. He asks her to be handfasted, referring to an ancient ritual of marriage. The story takes place at the tail end of the 16th century, but it\u2019s not really a period piece. It\u2019s not really about Shakespeare at all (in O\u2019Farrell\u2019s book, he\u2019s never identified by name), so don\u2019t get too hung up on whether \u201cHamnet\u201d corresponds to your personal ideas of his family history. William and Agnes recognize that their families won\u2019t approve of their union, so they make love \u2014 indoors, in a rectangular room, surrounded by fresh round fruit \u2014 which in turn makes a child, their first daughter, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach). Now the world must accept their union, they wager.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen it comes time for Agnes to bear her first child, she returns to the forest, giving birth at the base of the tree. It\u2019s a difficult, painful process, observed from above in a shot that recalls images from Lars von Trier\u2019s \u201cAntichrist\u201d \u2014 which could be seen as the extreme masculine version of the same narrative: A man and woman lose a child, they retreat to the woods, where Willem Dafoe\u2019s character confronts his worst fears of the feminine. If you find \u201cHamnet\u201d difficult to endure at times, just tell yourself: At least it\u2019s not \u201cAntichrist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNear the place Agnes delivered Susanna is a hole, more vaginal than the one at the base of Guillermo del Toro\u2019s tree, and that motif is repeated later, during the climactic scene at the Globe Theatre in London, where Agnes goes to watch her husband\u2019s latest play, \u201cHamlet,\u201d performed on stage. The backdrop depicts a forest, at the center of which is a dark opening. If you\u2019re not reading the film in symbolic terms, you\u2019re missing a lot.<\/p>\n

\n\tBetween these two scenes \u2014 Susanna\u2019s birth and Hamlet\u2019s death \u2014 is the most agonizing depiction of grief I\u2019ve witnessed in years. I wish we could spend more time in the radiant glow of William and Agnes\u2019 love, but it burns brightly enough at the outset to sustain us. In short order, she\u2019s pregnant again, this time with twins. Her mother-in-law (Emily Watson, a von Trier veteran herself) insists that Agnes deliver indoors this time, effectively cutting this earth woman off from her feminine energy. But still, the waters rise to force their way in.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a laborious scene, to say the least, as Agnes gives birth to twins, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes). William, the man, sets off for the big city to become the world\u2019s most celebrated writer, but Zhao stays behind with Agnes and the family. Hamnet dies \u2014 that much is foretold, though the way it happens will break your heart \u2014 and his father and mother deal with it differently, to say the least.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf \u201cHamnet\u201d feels too much at times, ask yourself why that is. Is it the movie\u2019s fault, or is Zhao challenging us to confront something we\u2019ve been avoiding until now? There\u2019s the matter of death, which makes everyone uncomfortable, and which it\u2019s courageous for Buckley and Zhao to confront so directly. But it\u2019s the film\u2019s other feminine elements that are most enlightening to see centered this way onscreen.<\/p>\n

\n\tWithout giving too much away, William channels his grief into his work (\u201cHamnet\u201d invites us to see a play the world knows well through fresh eyes, as Shakespeare assumes the role of Hamlet\u2019s ghost for himself), while Agnes expresses hers from the foot of the stage. It was an inspired choice for Zhao to cast Noah Jupe, the older brother of the child who plays Hamnet, as the actor who originated the role of Hamlet on stage. How many times have we as a society seen this character fade to silence before our eyes? <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHamnet\u201d marks Zhao\u2019s first feature since her ambitious Marvel stumble in 2021 (a pivot that alienated some who preferred her magic-hour indie dramas), raising once again that eternal question, \u201cTo be or not to be,\u201d just not in the conventional sense. In her hands, Shakespeare\u2019s indelible line doesn\u2019t represent a contemplation of suicide so much as what it means to be \u2014\u00a0to fully embrace life, when the inevitability of death is enough to paralyze one into a self-protective stupor. Ultimately, the filmmaker invites the world to feel loss in a new way, and in letting go, liberates something fundamental in all of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By some perverse coincidence, this year at the Telluride Film Festival, there were three movies about William Shakespeare\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33004,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[15770,18,117,25885,19,17,24510,327,25194],"class_list":{"0":"post-33003","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-chloe-zhao","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-hamnet","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-jessie-buckley","15":"tag-movies","16":"tag-telluride-film-festival"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}