Hamnet (2025)

Director: Chloé Zhao

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn

Have I Seen It Before: Never. This year has run so completely away from me that, to my horror, I’m getting to see very few new release this fall. I’m almost tempted to give the film a positive review only on the fact that I could fit in a screening, not go to a theater I don’t care for, and I could get everything else done I wanted to that day.

Did I Like It: Back to the question at hand. One might be tempted to say that, for all its unflinching view of the worst possible moments in a person’s life, the entire affair ends on too happy of a note. That happiness further undercuts the film’s greatest surface strengths. Centering a film on the Agnes* Hathaway (Buckley) and Hamnet** Shakespeare

(Jacobi Jupe), figures only remembered by history for their accidental association to certain playwrights*** tells their stories for the first time is a thrilling choice. They are given dimension and vibrant life all of their own, and exist beyond the tragic footnote or the frustrating anchor that history’s hero had to overcome to become William ShakespeareTM (Mescal).

But constructing the story so that they can only come to some sort of peace via the genius of their husband/father puts both characters back on the shelf where they’ve before the credits roll. This is a well-made film, with performances at the center that should receive attention at awards time.

I just wish it didn’t feel the need to put everything back the way it has been this whole time. Maybe I can move on from the ending. It helps to remember that William and Agnes hardly lived happily-ever after. But that means I have to meet the film more than halfway.

*You might know her as Anne.

**One of the big theses of the film is that spelling was less of a science and more of a moment-to-moment experience in the late-Tudor/early-Jacobean period, and it kind of all adds up, I suppose.

***Why can’t my own era be a little looser with the spelling? Because I have real opinions about how that word should be spelled.

Wicked Little Letters (2023)

Director: Thea Sharrock

Cast: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Anjana Vasan, Joanna Scanlan

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: Sad to say that I probably liked the trailer a fair bit better than the actual film itself. I’m in a weird period of my life right now where I have the opportunity to see the trailer for pretty much every independent film about two or three times. This one seemed jumped out at me those handful of times as the right mix of quaint British countryside humor and palpable tension that is the stuff of the most entertaining films. It looked like this could be this year’s answer to Fargo (1996).

And all of the elements are there. The mystery of just who is writing the scandalous letters is dispensed with fairly quickly, but the question as to whether or not the likable Rose Gooding (Buckley) will be found innocent, or if justice will come around to the fundamentally hateful (but still ultimately human) Edith Swan (Colman) is fueled with just enough uncertainty that the film goes down easy enough. It helps that the film is based on a true story (more so than Fargo can actually ever claim to be) that isn’t well known. The film is peopled with the right number of eccentrics, anything less would have been something criminal for a light British entertainment.

So then why am I not more effusive about the film? The simplest explanation is probably that there is just nothing new here, and the film is content with being a slight entertainment and nothing more. The thing that gnaws at the back of my mind is that sometimes a film may be built with all of the right elements and all of the right intentions, but for reasons beyond our understand the film doesn’t quite come together.

Men (2022)

Director: Alex Garland

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Eddiedu, Gayle Rankin

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: Outside of the norm, I’m writing this review after we recorded an episode of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods discussing it. We all had a measure of uncertainty about how we felt about the movie. The others leaned toward liking it, and at recording time and now I think I’m going to land on the other end of the divide.

There is some effective atmosphere on display, the performances are uniformly equal to the film surrounding them (that’s probably damning with faint praise) and there’s some authentically imaginative special effects, especially in the film’s final act.

But that’s where the problems become unavoidable for me. There’s a palpable air of misogyny streaked throughout the film, and that unflinching quality is where the film succeeds, or would have us content that its confidence is success. I can’t quite get past my read that there is an ugly vein of TERF-yness streaking across the film’s beating heart.

When Samuel is first introduced, he wears a cheap halloween mask of a female face, only to immediately push that aside and reveal the most demonstrably hateful man of all the titular men. This all culminates in the films most pointedly horrifying sequence, where all of those men proceed to give birth to each other. Is there anything more frightening to Alex Garland than people assigned male at birth beginning to take on feminine characteristics?

Is it a particularly British impulse to feel their need to not only be that hateful but express it? Probably not. Is this the only read one can have of the film? Most definitely not. But these are the thoughts I have now, even with some time away from the film.