Awards season is never without its fair share of crying at the movies.
Still, the first thing you’ve likely heard about Oscar-winner director Chloé Zhao’s latest film, Hamnet–before even predictions about its Oscar chances–is the degree to which it is leaving crowds in a pool of tears. Since its world premiere, headlines and breathless social media posts alike have dubbed it the awards hopeful that wrings out audible sobs from audiences.
The film stars Jessie Buckley as Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), who is fictionalized mainly due to how little is known about her. It centers on an event whose details are similarly mysterious to history: the death of their son, the titular Hamnet.
Zhao spends more time on the living rather than the dying, however, following Agnes and William’s romance from its beginning through to the tragedy that they endure, all while the playwright is away from home, where’s he’s off composing his enduring works of literature.
Jacobi Jupe stars as Hamnet and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare Courtesy of Focus Features/Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features
All the scuttlebutt around the emotional crowd reactions may have something to do with how the Hamnet was introduced to its first audiences. At several of the film’s pre-release events (such as festival screenings and Q&As alike) Zhao led attendees in a decidedly unorthodox ritual: With a hand on her heart, Zhao led a guided meditation breathing exercise, asking the crowd to breathe in unison and open themselves to the film. Zhao ends this all by inviting the audience to look around at the fellow patrons.
It’s a deeply earnest display that requires a bit of good faith to go along with, with some audience members’ reactions expectedly skewing towards mockery. But if such goings-on raise a skeptic eyebrow or seem silly to some, they nevertheless are in service of the material, preparing the audience for the grand finale of Zhao’s film.
When I attended the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere (whether or not I participated in the meditation is strictly between me and the nation of Canada, thank you), it wasn’t just a screening peppered with audible sobs throughout. In a purposeful moment of quiet after one of its emotional powerhouse scenes, there was another wave of ruffling commotion up the balcony. It was the sound of scattered patrons rummaging through their bags for their tissues, basically in unison.
So what has audiences leaving Hamnet in headline-grabbing weeping? It’s not just the harrowing death of its title character and the grief that Buckley and Mescal perform onscreen—though that sequence, coupled with a traumatic birthing scene earlier in the film, do much to weaken our defenses.
Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes. Agata Grzybowska/Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features
The most significant impact comes at the finale. After the Shakespeares have lost their son and the writer struggles to articulate his grief among his family, Agnes journeys to see her husband’s new play, which bears the name of their dead child. (Historically, the name Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable.) As she watches what would become her husband’s most well-known masterpiece, she is at first upset. But, moved by the lead actor’s (Noah Jope) performance and by the hidden meaning drawn directly from family life, she begins to see what her husband has communicated through this play.
She sees her son immortalized on the stage, brought back to life with all the words her husband could not manage in reality. Lost in the moment, she reaches her hand out to the actor. Her grief causes this shocking break of the fourth wall, but then the entire theater of people around her also extends their hands toward the stage.
Noah Jupe stars as Hamlet Agata Grzybowska/Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features
They don’t know the real story that is being translated into the tragic prince of Denmark, but they are moved all the same; we should interpret that as a response to whatever of their own personal grief they can see represented in the play. Just as Zhao intends to draw strangers together for a communal experience before her film, Agnes and the crowd at Hamlet experience something cathartic together.
All of this is set to Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” something of a movie music expressway to tears that has previously brought emotional heft to such films as Arrival and Shutter Island. It’s a piece of music that filmmakers keep returning to to turn up the dial on their poignancy–even TV shows like The Last of Us have kept it in their arsenal–so much so that it may be time to retire it indefinitely. But maybe some timeless familiarity is part of why it plays so effectively in Hamnet. It’s made us cry before, and it will do it again!
Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare Agata Grzybowska/Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features
Hamnet isn’t merely the trauma drama its tougher critics have made it out to be. It’s ultimately about art’s capacity to heal not only the artist, but the audience as well–a metatextual leap of faith. The film is making people cry because it embodies the human tradition of finding meaning in our lives through art and performance, and how an artist like Shakespeare can continue to move people throughout centuries. It’s about why we even show up to the theater in the first place.
