Chloé Zhao’s lyrical, elegiac new film Hamnet, based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, has been an Oscars frontrunner since its festival release earlier this year. But as it made its way to mainstream theaters over Thanksgiving week, a new narrative emerged with a central question: Is this film, built around the harrowing death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son and the writing of Hamlet, a moving meditation on grief and the power of art to help us process it? Or is it hokey and manipulative schlock?

There is something about the sheer force of emotion Hamnet evokes, in its theaters full of weeping audiences, that seems to make critics as suspicious as they are moved.

“‘Hamnet’ Feels Elemental,” went the headline of Justin Chang’s New Yorker review, “But Is It Just Highly Effective Grief Porn?” In the review itself, Chang confessed he watched the movie with eyes “blurred by tears, brought on with such diluvial force as to both quench my skepticism and reawaken it.”

In the New York Times, former Vox-er Alissa Wilkinson describes Hamnet as “ardent and searing and brimming with emotion.” The praise comes with a caveat: “That amount of heat can be tough to handle without veering into sentimentality. In a few places Zhao can’t, or won’t, keep it under control. …The parts of the film that feel beautifully full to overflowing are undercut, occasionally, by feelings of just a little too much, a shot or directorial choice that’s just a tad too precious.”

One surprising thing

Shakespeare borrowed the plot for Hamlet from other sources, as he did with most of his plays. But he made one big change. In the source material for Hamlet, the melancholy Dane has a great reason for pretending to be mad. He’s a child when the story begins, and he has to hide out in his murderous uncle’s court until he’s big and strong enough to take his enemy down. He pretends to be crazy for years as a long game, so his uncle will think he isn’t a threat and spare his life.

As the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt lays out, Shakespeare simply trashed that straightforward plot. Shakespeare’s Hamlet has no good reason to pose as a madman. His motives are opaque, apparently as much to himself as they are to us. It’s that very mystery that makes Hamlet such a profoundly complex figure. By destroying the story, Shakespeare created an indelible character.

When I saw Hamnet, the audience was audibly sobbing at more than one scene. I was sobbing myself. I felt emotionally drained, as though I had been dragged through some profound catharsis. Yet I also found myself a little leery of such a physical, overwhelming response. I wasn’t sure whether what I was seeing was moving me in a complex, productive way, or whether it was just playing a clumsy tune on the horrible human fact that I have seen death, as we all eventually will.

More broadly, the question I had was: Can we trust grief when it is shown to us in such a bare, raw fashion? Does seeing mourning unadorned give us anything?

Ironically, this question is at the heart of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play obsessed with whether over-the-top expressions of grief are authentic or manipulative.

At stake for both Hamlet and for the Hamnet debate are fundamental questions about how we deal with the problem of death and why........

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