Zhao’s Hamnet opens with Agnes sleeping in the forest moments before she meets William. As may be discerned from the subtitle of Maggie O’Farrell’s original novel (Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague), the couple’s young son, Hamnet, dies while William is away in London. Emotional manipulation alone is not necessarily detractive or a malicious thing for a film to do, but overt emotional manipulation is distracting. In other words, we needn’t see the man behind the curtain, and there are moments in Hamnet where we do. My qualm with the emotional manipulation charge is that most of the film’s indelible emotional moments don’t come across as heavy-handed at all.

Source: Daily Sun January 28, 2026 22:04 UTC