HAMNET **

 There's one great moment in "Hamnet" and it occurs at the very end, (I won't say anymore on that score for those who have yet to see it), but it's a long slog getting there. Of course, even if you haven't seen the film most people will know that "Hamnet" is the story of how Shakespeare's young son Hamnet died of the plague and how Will and his wife, here called Agnes, coped with their grief and it's based on a highly praised novel by Maggie O'Farrell who co-wrote the screenplay with director Chloe Zhao.

I haven't read the novel but perhaps my expectations were unduly high having loved Zhao's early work and being very much part of the Buckley/Mescal fan-base and neither of them really disappoints here. Indeed the four central performances, (Buckley, Mescal, Emily Watson and the remarkable young Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet), are excellent so I suppose the fault has to lie with Zhao.

This is a movie about grief and nothing else; everything is directed towards Hamnet's death and how his parents deal with it, Agnes by withdrawing into herself and Shakespeare, we are lead to believe, by writing 'Hamlet' and if you are going to channel everything into grief then it must be primal if it's to devastate you or even move you but Zhao gives us grief smothered in a blanket of good taste and all the restraint of never allowing your primal scream to upset the neighbours.

This is grief that finds its climax at a performance of 'Hamlet' at the Globe Theatre to a packed house with Agnes standing right at the front. It might have worked were it not for the fact that Zhao casts Jupe's older brother Noah as the young actor playing Hamlet and he simply isn't up to the challenge while, at least what we assume is this initial performance of the play, Shakespeare casts himself as the ghost of Hamlet's father so he can weep and embrace his dead son, (Hamlet/Hamnet; getit-gotit-good?).

This performance of the play takes up about the last twenty minutes or so of the film and just when I thought it was all over Zhao pulls off one final magnificent coup with a great final single shot that, if it didn't quite jerk my tears, at least ended the film of something of a cinematic high. Still, Buckley, Mescal and young Jacobi deserve better than this noble weepie.