#88: I am a Hamnet hater
Death By Consumption
2/3/26 - 2/9/26
I need to speak my truth about something: I have the worst stye I’ve ever had in my life, one that I have been informed may require surgery if it doesn’t go down over the next month(!), and it’s made practically everything I enjoy — reading, writing, looking at things, blinking, being alive — extremely annoying. There are worse ailments a person can get, of course, but also I’m pretty sure I’ve suffered more than anyone else on the planet this week. Let’s hope it goes away ASAP, because I have my tickets to see Wuthering Heights and I know I’m going to need both eyes operating at 100% in order to take in whatever madness awaits.
This week: I scoffed at most of Hamnet, I was horrified by Sirat, and I read a new novel about a production of Hamlet in Palestine — it’s unintentionally Hamlet week!
Hamnet (2025) — on Apple TV
I dragged my feet on seeing Hamnet, because I’m kind of never in the mood to watch a movie about a child’s death, you know? But I knew the day would have to come eventually, so once it hit streaming I decided to pull the trigger. And, sure, I found it emotionally devastating and extremely well-directed and well-acted, and Jessie Buckley is more than deserving of her Oscar nom. But… I didn’t really like it! Sorry!
Mostly, I was unpleasantly surprised at how obvious and overwrought it was. This feels like an Oscar winner from the late 90s, and while those kinds of movies were (and clearly still are!) effective at pulling tears — if not full-body sobs — from audiences, they’re also not, like, actually good movies. For every genuinely emotional scene, I often found myself immediately pulled back out of the movie by a scene making some of the most scoff-inducing choices I’ve seen a film make in a while.
When Agnes (I know Shakespeare’s wife was alternately called Agnes and Anne throughout history and possibly even her life, but it’s so funny to me that she has to be called Agnes in the movie simply because having a character literally named “Anne Hathaway” would be extremely confusing) gives birth, it’s a largely bloodless affair, and babies are plucked from beneath her skirt looking clean and fresh, without even a pesky umbilical cord to deal with. The movie is full of weird, discordant, or just plain corny choices like that; in another moment, when William and Agnes are first falling in love, we cut from their love-making in the forest to William at home, furiously writing Romeo & Juliet. I’m almost shocked there wasn’t a scene in which someone says, “Ahhh... a lovely Midsummer night, what a dream!” before we cut to William furiously scribbling the title A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Even worse, after their son Hamnet has died, and he and Agnes are both overcome with grief, we watch William step up to the edge of the Thames and consider suicide, only to recite Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech in full — apparently he is writing the most iconic monologue of all time during a flash of inspiration in the midst of suicidal ideation. Look, I don’t need realism in a movie like this, and I’m not asking to watch Paul Mescal scribbling and struggling with a quill over his verses for hours, but can we not have at least a little taste here? For a highly lauded and soon-to-be-Oscar-winning film, I was mortified to see the most egregious and embarrassing use of “to be or not to be” since Adam Driver randomly recited it in Megalopolis.
What’s even weirder about those first un-subtle 90 minutes is how delicate and beautiful the final 30 minutes are. You’d think there’d be nothing left to mine from yet another creative interpretation of a fictional performance of Hamlet (and this wasn’t even the only fictional interpretation of Shakespeare’s work I consumed this week!), and yet Chloé Zhao managed to breathe new life into this dusty old play.
That final act of the movie delivers some of the best face acting I’ve seen in forever, as we watch Jessie Buckley’s character react first with horror at her son’s name being used in a play, then realize that her husband had been grieving in his own way the whole time, and, finally, realize that not only is she not alone in her grief, but that the entire world will be grieving her son forever. That’s a hefty serving of complex emotions to get across while using nothing but the dialogue from Hamlet and Jessie Buckley’s face, and yet they pulled it off. Which makes the rest of the movie so baffling and frustrating to me — if they could make a movie like that this whole time, why didn’t they?
Sirat (2025) — streamed at home
“I think this is like a fun adventure thriller?” I said to Justin before we saw Sirat. An hour later, we were stuck with our hands covering our mouths, watching in shock and horror at the things we were witnessing. Sirat is outrageously stressful and bleak, one of those movies that I never want to watch again. It’s difficult to discuss without spoiling it, so I’ll keep it brief, but the plot is simple: a father and his young son are searching for the man’s missing daughter, and travel from one Moroccan desert rave to another in an attempt to track her down. So it is an adventure, of sorts, but not a fun one. This movie fucked me up for hours after, so don’t plan on seeing it before, say, a child’s birthday party!
Too Soon, by Betty Shamieh (2025) — library ebook
Too Soon could be called the Palestinian Pachinko, a big novel telling the story of a family through a few generations, and while Pachinko remains the stronger book, I thought Too Soon was a lovely and surprising book that tells a different kind of story about Palestine than you’re probably used to. It follows three generations of women — the grandmother who is forced to leave Palestine during the Nakba, her daughter who grows up in the United States, and then the granddaughter, a thoroughly American woman, who returns to Palestine to direct a performance of (what else?) Hamlet.
The opening sections with Arabella, the American granddaughter, are some of the weakest in the book, and quite honestly almost made me give up on the book entirely. Something about her deeply Millennial-coded narration was triggering, and I wasn’t sure if I could endure it for hundreds of pages (instead of “motherfucker” she says “motherlover,” which I took as the author feeling that particular slur would be inappropriate in a book about mothers and daughters, but I found it unbearably cringe).
I mean, this is how Arabella speaks:
I had seen a production of Equus there when I was in high school that made my panties wet and not just because a dude was naked in it and I saw my first adult wee-wee (although that helped).
It’s all just a little too Millennial “meep” for me, but, to be fair, the “present” of the book is set in 2012, and that is how certain people my age spoke and wrote back then. And it feels like a deliberate choice to make Arabella speak so unseriously and, frankly, obnoxiously, to reflect that this is a deliberately not serious book about Palestinians. It deals with trivial matters by design, because that is exactly the point: Palestinians deserve the right to trivialities just as much as we do.
Reading it, I realized that we hardly ever get to see or hear about normal life in Palestine. Setting the book in 2012 is clearly a deliberate choice to show us what “normalcy” in Palestine was like before Israel started their genocide, and it’s a risky choice — I have to assume the title Too Soon is partly Shamieh asking whether it’s too soon to put out a book like this. But I think it’s even more necessary now, to show that Palestinians have always just been regular people trying to survive, no different than you or I, and to show a Western audience Palestine outside of the victim/aggressor binary narrative people love to ascribe to them. As she writes about the city of Ramallah: “It is a city under siege in a country that the world didn’t fully recognize, but it felt like a country just the same, with its hospitals and universities and girls who needed to experience more than the din around them.”
This book revels in the trivialities of life in Palestine, because, after all, life is trivialities. There’s always the horrific background of the occupation — Arabella’s love interest is a doctor, so he’s frequently reporting on the everyday war crimes like two boys whose feet were shot by Israelis so that they couldn’t play soccer anymore — but the real focus of the book is on Arabella’s work life and love life. It makes the story all the more effective, and broadens Palestinian literature in a way that it often isn’t allowed to be: after all, Palestinians have work drama and romantic drama just like the rest of us, so why shouldn’t those stories be told?
As Arabella frets about whether it’s inappropriate or pointless to care about a production of Hamlet in a virtual war zone, you can feel Shamieh working out her own feelings about writing a silly little love triangle set in Palestine. But, the book is directly arguing, why can’t Palestine have its own Bridget Jones? Do Palestinian stories always have to carry the weight of their history, or can they have a little fun like the rest of us? In a world desperate to dehumanize Palestinians, and a media environment that wants you to never think about the people who live there, I don’t think it’s too soon to tell a story like this; I think it’s been long overdue.