Hamnet

Agnes wanted her husband to grieve harder for the loss of their son, yet he ended up making centuries of people mourn that child instead. Paul Mescal is once again very good at playing men consumed by grief, but Jessie Buckley delivers a generational performance that ultimately overshadows him. Knowing that only one of her performance here, or Renate Reinsve’s in Sentimental Value, will ever be awarded an Oscar feels genuinely unfair. From a different perspective the end was a strange triangle I couldn’t ignore: Arrival, Hamnet, and Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight. Both films revolve around the loss of a child, both center on mothers who can foresee in different ways. Add Jessie Buckley’s performance in Alex Garland’s Men to that lineage, and it starts to feel like the same grief echoing through different forms, stories, and bodies.