Recensioni di Metacritic

Hamnet is devastating, maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years.

Ultimately, the filmmaker invites the world to feel loss in a new way, and in letting go, liberates something fundamental in all of us.

The film serves as a lovely reminder of why art is important, how watching something can make you feel, make you understand, make you consider.

Zhao has fashioned a masterwork that, once again, straddles the line between narrative and cinematic art in a manner few of her contemporaries can match.

The violent beauty of this film, which rips your soul out of your chest so completely that its seismic grief almost feels like falling in love or becoming a parent, is that it’s as much about the experience of having a child as it is about the experience of losing one.

In Hamnet . . . the two always go hand in hand: joy and fear, love and loss. One feeds into the other in a cycle as old as life itself, and unavoidable. But just as her William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) turns the pain of being caught between the two into the masterpiece that is Hamlet, Zhao harnesses those elements into something gorgeous and cathartic.

Hamnet captures the beautiful aching that makes up life in all its forms, and it makes for one of the most profound and staggering works you’ll see this year.

It’s a masterful reflection on how grief tears us apart, and the ways in which we try to put ourselves back together again. It is a film that lingers long after the credits roll, embedding its quiet power into the viewer’s mind and heart, a meditation on loss that is both intimate and universal.

Zhao is a good fit for the material. She, too, is a close observer of nature and of the many aching, yearning people passing through it. But she has previously not made anything as traditionally tailored and refined as this.

A work of tremendous look-at-me energy: all prolonged close-ups and studied master shots of actors weeping, screaming, laughing, longing, and freaking out with sweaty, grimy intensity.