Please don’t call Hamnet a weepie

On so-called ‘grief p*rn’

Jessie Buckley in Hamnet. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

In the past 24 hours, I’ve typed and then deleted comments on at least two media pieces about the film Hamnet.

I typed them out in frustration – a probably deeply unfashionable, over-earnest frustration – at the way the film has been received by some. I deleted them again because I’m not sure what good it does to leave little pieces of my heart below-the-line (I guess if I’m going to do it, I’ll do it here, from the comfort of my own newsletter.)

I saw Hamnet before I read any of the growing discourse around whether or not it’s ‘grief porn’ or ‘emotionally manipulative’. But, unfortunately, I’ve read these takes now.

And, well, I’m quite cross.

Perhaps predictably, I thought the film was incredible. It could just be one of the best films I’ve seen. It looks gorgeous: the palette all earth, mosses and ferns, save for Agnes’s red dresses, which stand out like a warning. Every performance is impeccable – not only Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, but Emily Watson as Shakespeare’s mother Mary, through to the young actors who play the Shakespeare children.

And, for me, the film’s presentation of loss and grief is nuanced, considered, grounded in something true.

For instance, there’s a scene in which Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) arrives home, called back from London, but he’s too late, his son already dead. He sees the body laid out in its winding sheet – and smiles. He cannot help himself. ‘My boy,’ he says. It’s a devastating moment, an interesting acting choice, and a succinct expression of the powerful parental love and pride that remains when other people see only horror.

In an earlier scene, when Agnes gives birth to the twins, Hamnet and Judith, and her daughter appears to be stillborn at first, the midwife attending tries to insist Agnes not hold the baby girl as it’s ‘bad luck’ to look upon ‘it’. A moment designed, surely, knowing full well that even within living memory, many women faced a similar attitude when their babies died, not permitted to hold or see their children as it was deemed better for them psychologically this way.

Or consider the scene when, after Hamnet’s death, Shakespeare tells Agnes – who is ashen, numb with grief – that he is returning to work in London. They argue. She is angry he wasn’t there and that he gets to leave again. All the while, she is peeling boiled eggs at the wooden kitchen table, picking the shell off with her fingers.

It’s such a small thing. But I remember thinking, yes, this is what grief can be like: the veil of all pleasure and comfort stripped away, leaving nothing between you and life’s depressing, sensory squalor. Eggshell sticking under fingernails.

And yes, I cried. Not in a way I’d describe as cathartic. Not in a way that felt like a ‘good’ cry. I was haunted by this film for days afterwards.

It’s not perfect. Is it perhaps a touch too twee-ly bucolic in places? The aesthetic veering into tradwife territory? Maybe. Then again, perhaps that’s deliberate. Perhaps there’s a point in making that particular visual nod only to contrast it with a brutal, unsparing death scene of a fever-racked child – his mother frantically trying to heal him, but ultimately powerless in a time before vaccines, before antibiotics.

The idea that any of this makes Hamnet a ‘weepie’ in the way of a John Lewis advert or even a sentimental, soft-focus movie like Love Story or The Notebook is…. so far removed from the point of this film it feels almost offensive to me.

What do we mean when we dismiss something as ‘grief porn’? I guess it’s implying something gratuitous, debasing, bordering on shameful.

Which is interesting when you consider the way many bereaved parents today often describe being made to feel, shamed into silence: it’s too much, we don’t need to hear it.

Or else, the word ‘porn’ is being used to suggest – what? – inauthenticity? In calling something grief ‘porn’, are you, therefore, suggesting that the emotions it inspires in someone else are somehow less meaningful than your own more artistically discerning emotions?

It’s curiously arrogant to see a film provoke something in an audience, something that you do not experience yourself, and to assume the deficiency must be the film’s – or the audience’s. To decree that what they are experiencing verges on degrading; merely ‘grief porn’.

It’s not that the film should make you cry, or that you have to like it, even. My point is only that it’s a mistake to assume you’re seeing something they’re not, rather than the other way around.

My emotions didn’t need to be manipulated when I watched Hamnet. It tapped into a deep well of what was already there – experiences and feelings that are not rare and yet rarely represented with nuance, gravitas or main-character energy. Things that don’t often get much of a look-in during awards season, certainly.

My guess is, it’s the same for many of the people crying in the cinema at Hamnet.

Because there is a huge cohort of us out here who – for many reasons, be it a traumatic birth, a miscarriage, illness, the loss of a baby or child at any age – do not need reminding, as Shakespeare’s mother Mary says in the film (a line drawn from the original novel):

‘What is given may be taken away, at any time… Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.’

Lest I be accused of ‘grief cos-play’, to be clear, I have not lost a child. Or a baby at full-term. I have lost only the beginnings of children, five times over.

But you do not actually need to have lost an 11-year-old to the bubonic plague in 1596 to feel the truth of those words in your bones.

And perhaps it’s this deep ocean of underrepresented human experience (often, though not exclusively, intimate female experience) that’s being overlooked by the critics carping about ‘grief porn’, apparently baffled at the response to this film.

Perhaps this is what they’re missing.

Which is so predictable, I could cry.