Hamnet. The Movie.

  

 

“Grief fills the room of my absent child.”

 

Adapted by Maggie O’Farrell’s from her 2020 novel with the Director Chloe Zhao, starring Jesse Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare.  Cinematography by Lukasz Zal, Music by Max Richter, Production Design by Fiona Crombie. Produced by Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes.  

 

I am writing this article assuming that most people who read it will by now know that the film deals with the death of Hamnet, the Shakespeare couples young son, and suggests how this may have affected William’s work on the playHamlet.   

 

 In it I look at how the film affected me and those I have seen it with, especially those closely acquainted with grief;  how truthfully it seemed to speak about the nature of grief; how the media of print and film can speak to us in different ways; with a brief exploration of possible actual links between Hamnet’s death and his father’s writing; and lastly a consideration of the film’s score, and the slight critical dispute about it.       

 

It is generally understood that our response of any film depends on what we bring to it.

Some audiences of Hamnet will not have read the book.    They will, I think, enjoy a beautifully filmed love story, set in the late 16^th century English countryside, with two very good actors playing Agnes and Will Shakespeare alongside a fine supporting cast,  sensitively directed and lusciously filmed with a wonderfully persuasive score and soundscape.    It may well move them to tears, but not, I expect, leave them bereft.   I hope that many of them will then read the book. 

 

Some will have read the book, and come wondering how it has been have adapted for the screen.    I do not think they will be disappointed.    I am sure that many will, like me, appreciate the way the filming of the final scene offers rather more than the written word could.   

 

There are also some who come to see it knowing that both book and film centre on grief, in this case parental grief;  but grief is grief is grief, and all grief is about love.   So they will not expect this movie to be altogether easy to watch – or listen to.   They too may be moved to tears as, we are told, many previous audiences have been.   But the ending comes to a kind of resolution and a reconciliation that I found comforting and profound.    Having watched it twice, with friendsI am now sure that this beautiful and demanding gift from the novelist, film maker and crew offers catharsis and consolation to those who need it and are willing and able to accept it.   Our response of any work of art depends on what we bring to it – and are able to take from it.  

 

I also want to encourage those who have not seen this movie to do so in a cinema.   Sharing laughter and/or tears in the company of an audience is so much more powerful than home viewing.  

 

Good Art, in its visual, literary, musical or kinetic forms, can sometimes reach into our heart-strings and strike chords there that evoke deep responses of joy, pity, compassion, love, agitation, calm  – and sorrow.        

 

I have read Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet twice, once to myself and once out-loud to someone I love, so I knew that grief was at its core.   As young and brilliant actor Jacobi Jupe, who played Hamnet, said at the Golden Globe Awards, “This film is about grief and love.  And grief is love.”    We do no grieve for someone we do not love.  More than that; love is the sea on which we sail our little lives and grief but one of the storms that disturb it.    We hold on, praying that the storm will abate with time, and the sea will abide.          

 

Hamnet is a work of fiction and Ms O’Farrell does not claim that its story is true.  But fiction can be truthful rather than true.  I have now seen it twice, with four friends, and out of the five of us three have been bereaved, two by losing a boy-child, one their wife;  two are trained therapists and one of us a Vicar who has worked with hundreds of families before, during and after funerals.   This film reached deeply into all our hearts and the chords it struck there rang true.            

 

For the first part of the film I was, in a way, ‘watching the book’,  seeing how O’Farrell and Chloe Zhao had between them transferred the words to the screen, and how the cast, especially Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as Will, had interpreted their characters.  From the start I loved this watching this ‘translation’.  And then the film itself took over.    The production design and costumes seemed very authentic,  properly grubby and lived in.   The composition of every image was gorgeous.     The editing, which obviously  could not replicate that of the book, was coherent.        The soundscape and music carried us forward without ever being intrusive.   

 

And all of that was scene-setting for the central and essential tragedy, and its aftermath.   And now it became very personal.   Jessie Buckley’s anguished howl as she held her dead son instantly took me back nearly twenty years to when I held my own dead wife in my arms.    Then Paul Mescal’s acting out of Will’s response reminded me of how I had also struggled for years to find a way to live out my own grief.   

 

Agnes and Will may share a common grief, but like so many of us they responded to it in differing ways, and that is not always easy for grieving couples or families.  But then came the film’s masterstroke, expanding the book’s final chapter not with words but with profound direction and the acting of the two lead players as we watched their healing in front us.  Here the medium’s advantages became most important.    I love written fiction, but sometimes words can be brought even more to life by film.   It is a little like the way a type printed page differs from an illuminated manuscript, but much more so.   The uses of pauses, silences, gestures, looks and facial expressions cannot be written on the page as well as they can be shown on the screen.   

 

It is only when Will has transmuted his grief into words, into the play that bears his son’s name, transferring  it as he needed to from those of the father for his son, Hamnet, to that of the son, Hamlet, for his Father, and then physically acting them out on stage, that he 

can break down and privately weep.  Then we see Agnes’ dawning understanding of her husband for the first time, of how his art was vital and essential to his emotional processes.    She is then no longer enraged that he had run away to avoid his grief, now seeing that he had run away to find a way to express – and ultimately perform - his grief.   

 

We also see the child Hamnet freed at last from the dim grey space he entered when he died.  This seemed to me to resemble the Jewish Sheol or classical Greek realm of after-life in which the dead are not punished but live a half-life in a shadowy realm where there is no hope, no volition, no direction.   Very early in the story Will tells Agnes the story of Eurydice and Orpheus and how she was condemned to remain in Hades.   Both Ursula le Guin and Phillip Pullman wrote about their versions of this place in their Earthsea: The Other Wind and His Dark Materials volume Three; The Amber Spyglass, each of them finding way for these dead souls to be released.   And we see Hamnet released as both his parents allow him to move on -  as they have at last moved on.   The film ends with the glorious smiles of the child and mother.   

 

Most of the audience who watched Hamnet with us sat in silence for some time after the credits had finished, and I remember how glad I was that by accident or design the houselights were not turned up for a while.   And yes, there were tears, as reported from many previous showings, but I think and hope that for many of us, maybe even most of us, they were tears of relief.     Agnes and Will’s grief had not become lessened, but this play, Hamlet, had helped them to become more reconciled to it and to each other.   Now at last they could walk forward together, hands and hearts joined together again.    And it seems to me that by the magic of this high art so could some of us, as we also move forward a little, having revisited our own personal losses and taken an another small but significant step along our own healing journey.    

 

With regard to the quote that heads this piece, Will Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died in 1596.  He was eleven or twelve years old.  Shakespeare’s play King John  appeared in the same year.  In it Constance is the widow of King Richard I’s younger brother Geoffrey, and the mother of Prince Arthur.  Arthur had the most legitimate claim to the throne so John had him assassinated.  In Act 3, scene 4 we hear Constance pouring out her rage and grief.  Having lost her husband and her son she is drawn to suicide.    When Cardinal Pandulph, the Papal Legate, tells her she is talking madness, not grief, she says;

 

 “Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost!

I am not mad: I would to heaven I were! 

For then ‘tis like I should forget myself:

O! If I could, what grief would I forget.

Preach me some philosophy to make me mad, 

And thou shalt be canoniz’d, Cardinal,

For being not mad but sensible of grief,

My reasonable part produces reason 

How I may be delivered from these woes, 

And teaches me to kill or hang myself”.

 

 Is this a pre-echo of ‘To be or not to be’ in Hamlet?  Some critics have objected to this speech being used in the film as Will contemplates suicide, but King John shows that close to Hamnet’s death Shakespeare had deeply looked at the link between grief and suicidal thoughts.   Hamlet is surely a better play for Maggie O’Farrell to use as a conduit of Shakespeare’s grief than the much slighter King John.   I would also suggest that by this time in his writing his internal word-thoughts could take metrical form.    I know it can be quite easy – easy enough to become natural -  to think in iambic pentameters, not to turn thoughts into poetry but to think in so natural a poetic form, so why would not Will do so at this crucial juncture?  

 

And when scolded for holding ‘ too heinous a respect for grief,’  Constance turns on the celibate priest saying  ‘He talks to me, that never had a son.’  King Philip of Spain then says to her ‘You are as fond of grief as of your child,’ and she replies, 

 

“Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:

Then I have reason to be fond of grief.”

   

Constance is actually given 73 lines in this short scene, and they are the most memorable in the play, speaking to us about the emotional and fearless power of her maternal love and grief.    It seems likely that Shakespeare made his Arthur younger than the historical account, maybe almost as young as  Hamnet, in order to express something of his own grief; and he did not mind putting his words into the mouth of a grieving mother.     It was almost five years before  Hamlet appeared on stage, and grief is much more central there,  even if it is for a son grieving his father, rather than a father grieving his son.   Tom Stoppard once said, rather ruefully I thought, that in the links between an artist’s life and work ‘Nothing is wasted.’    

 

 

After seeing the King John connection I sought out the Steven Greenblatt article  The death of Hamnet and the making of Hamlet  referenced at the beginning of the film telling us that in the 16^th century the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable.  In this article the earlier play is explored more deeply.  He suggests that by the time Shakespeare was writing Hamlet his own father may well have been approaching death, and that writing Hamlet was a turning point for Shakespeare.     Hamlet considerably expanded his vocabulary – and ours –  and moved his characters away from actions motives based on reason to actions that grew out of powerful but confused feelings  (Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus?)    (The article can be downloaded at scribd.com.). 

 

I also confirmed that my supposition that Agnes, the name used for the woman we know as Ann Hathaway,  comes from the Greek and Roman for Holy and lamb.    In both the novel and film Agnes is shown to be a deeply spiritual, though not religious woman,  and shows the willingness to sacrifice her own happiness to help her husband fulfil his destiny, almost like a sacrificial lamb.   In her father’s Will she is indeed named Agnes.     

 

As a postscript for those who pay attention to film scores, I see that Jesse Buckley’s suggestion that Max Richter’s previous composition, On The Nature of Daylight, be used for the final scene was taken up.   Some critics have found fault in this.   

 

I remember reading this reproach in the New York Times review in November 2025, and it was recently repeated by one of my favourite film critics, Mark Kermode.     And yes, this music has been used a number of times, perhaps most effectively in Arrival where it was added to Johann Johannsson’s score.   Mark Kermode celebrated Arrival as showing ‘the way that joy and love and grief and mourning and celebration can be refracted’ by the combination of film and music.   He did not object to On The Nature of Daylight being used again in podcast review, or in his movie music book Surround Sound.   I love Arrival, and its inclusion of Max Richter’s piece.    Surely what matters is how appropriate a piece of music is, not how often I has been used?  

  

Allegri’s Miserere Mei has been used at least ten times in films ranging from  Chariots of Fire to Two Popes.    Faure’s Requiem in a similar number, and Bach’s Cello Suites  in well over 20.     If On The Nature of Daylight was as obvious as ‘manipulative’ strings playing swooping minor cords,  the Faure piece or Samuel Barber’s Adagio (in fact especially Samuel Barber’s Adagio) I may well have abreacted to it.   But its use in Hamnet was, for me, seamless with the rest of Richter’s score, and utterly at one with the complex emotions the final scene evoked.  

 

I have seen some fine films in the last twelve months, Conclave, Flow, 28 Years Later, Sinners and One Battle After Another,  but I am sure Hamnet is the one that will live with me the longest. 

Conclave, for those who have seen it!

 In the film Conclave the name and nationality of the Dean pf the College of Cardinals, who was responsible for running the election of a new Pope, was changed from Jacobo Lemoli, an Italian in the Robert Harris novel, to Thomas Lawrence when Ralf  Fiennes was cast in the role.   The Dean’s post is one of the four senior Cardinals in the Vatican along with the secretary of State,  the Chamberlain of The Holy See, and the Confessor in Chief.

Robert Harris is clear in his introduction to the novel that for the sake of authenticity he used these real titles throughout the novel, but the characters he created to fill these offices were not intended to bear any resemblance to their present day incumbents.

     

According to ‘Political Europe’ several Cardinals watched the film to understand the process of a Papal election. 

 

For those who have seen the film it is worth saying that according to canon law Cardinal Benitez would not have been allowed to attend the Conclave, as appointments made ‘in pectore’ end with the current Pope’s death.  The novel says that the late Pope changed this law, (p 74) though that is not mentioned in the film.     With regard to other matters Harris ‘consulted Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor as part of his research for the book. He later gave Murphy-O'Connor a copy of the novel, and to his surprise, Murphy-O'Connor sent a letter praising its accuracy.’   Wiki. 

 

The Dean’s homily before the conclave starts is pretty much straight form the novel. 

‘My brothers and sisters, in the course of along life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty.  Certainty is the deadly enemy of unity.   Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.Even Christ was not certain at the end. “Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani? He cried out in his agony at his ninth hour on the cross.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Our faith is a living faith precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt.  If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.' 

 

'Let us pray that the Lord will grant us a Pope who doubts and by his doubts continues to make the Catholic faith a living thing that may inspire the whole world,  Let Him grant us a Pope who sins, and asks for forgiveness, and carries on.’  (p123f)

But the words of Cardinal Benitez, in his response to those of Cardinal Tedesco after the seventh ballot, were revised for the script, clearly by Robert Harris and Peter Straughan, and the last of his words  ‘The Church is what we do next’ added.     

 

For me as theologian these words carry deep meaning.   What I hear there is that although we may acknowledge that a Church is not made of stone or bricks,  but of the people of faith, it may be less commonly understood that the Church is not an organisation or institution.   ‘The Body of Christ’ is not a bureaucracy, or even a hierarchy, so it is not defined by its physical presence or characteristics, but by its actions.   The Church is what the Church does,  and that activity keeps changing.   The Church is not what it was in the past, or did in the past, but what it is and does  now – and therefore by ‘what it does next’ in any given situation.  

 

Cardinal Tedesco, in his fear and anger looked backwards for guidance and authenticity.   Cardinal Benitez, in his faith (not hope, which is different), looked forward trusting in his Lord;   the Lord whose body ended up nailed to a cross.   So the Church should not fear even its own death.  The survival of the institution of the Church should not be its major concern.   

        

Peter Straughan, the scriptwriter, had previously adapted John le Carre’s novel ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ for the screen, working with his wife, the late Bridget O’Connor, and later adapted Hilary Mantel’s three ‘Wolf Hall’ novels for the BBC.   I do not think that would have been possible without a clear understanding of the theological background to those historical novels set at the time of the 16^th century English Reformation. He was, by the way, brought up in a Catholic family.    

 

His script for ‘Conclave’  won many awards including the Oscar.     

 

Steve, part 2.

The staff at Steve’s school, called ‘Last Chance’ in the book, are like islands in the stream, standing in a tumultuous torrent of pain and anger trying stop it tearing the young men in their care away downstream,  towards disaster.  Steve and his colleagues know they have to do all they can to hold them, emotionally, heartfully, courageously (heartfulness and courage are really the same thing) to offer them a place of physical and emotional safety in what may be the only place where they are accepted as they are, for whom they are,  despite their behaviour.    

In youth work and schools we kept saying that ‘if there is something wrong with a child or young person’s behaviour there is almost certainty something wrong with their situation.’       Their behaviour is symptomatic, not causal.   We needed to look beyond the behaviour and explore what was behind it.   Why, for instance, is the bully bullying? The liar lying?  And we learnt that those who have been abused, in whatever way, are not likely to present themselves in ways that arouse our sympathy.  

That is why we needed to set aside our expectations of ‘good behaviour’, of politeness, even decency, and to reach out across the void and offer a hand,  even when we expected it to be bitten.   Even when it had been bitten.  Being bitten hurts and these young people knew exactly how to hurt.   Their emotional (and too often physical) scars told their own story.      

But even this is not enough.   Such children and youths also need firm boundaries  consistently maintained by those who care for them.   This is the same discipline all children need of course, but for them it is in spades.   The young boys in Steve need to know that this really is their last chance, that outside the boundaries is a void.  Both Steve the character and Steve the movie are clear about this.   

But how can the Staff  doing work like this be so strong, so consistent, so alert and responsive  when  they are also standing on rocky ground, also in danger of being swept away  by the torrent?   The film is set in 1996, after 18 years of Tory Government,  but now Britain has emerged from another 15 years of their rule, another 15 years of underinvestment in education and youth work. 

I remember attending a national conference  called by the Tories in the mid 1990’s, when they wanted youth work to be ‘contracted out’ from Local Government to charities such as the uniformed organisations, the denominational Churches and the YMCA and YWCA.    But they needed us to tell them what measurable ‘outcomes’ we would produce to justify the work – and the expense.    These needed it to be quantifiable, so we could be accountable.   

Many of us did not know whether to laugh or cry, or both.    For most of us the only justification for our work was the potential benefit it might bring to those we worked with, and these benefits could not be measured, predicted, tracked or tested.  Many of them  might not emerge for years, long after they had left our clubs or organisations.     Some young people might not benefit at all from our efforts.   Some would certainly have been damaged, but none-the-less we were there to ‘cast our bread on the waters’ in hope.     We did the work simply for the sake of the young people. 

The situation we see in Steve shows what happens when work with children and young people is shaped by a governmental ethic of profit and loss.    Not by ‘what can we give?’ but by ‘what shall we gain?’    In our case the Minister suggested that our efforts might mean more young staying on in education, or going into work.   These things, they were sure, would improve the Nation’s economy.    Now, of course, most English schools are run by Academies, by businesses.   The work done in places like Steve’s school is not really economically viable.       

If this does not read like a movie review forgive me.   It is a review of the truths that this movie tells.     If you read The Guardian article linked to it you will see that Steve  was made by people who know what they are talking about, and who care about it passionately.  That is why it is a passionate movie - and yes, I say again that movies can be made to move us, and as the great critic Roger Ebert said, “to generate empathy”.    I was going to write about the Direction, the Music, Cinematography and of course the Actors, but you can find out all about these elsewhere.     This article is simply about what their combined efforts meant to me as someone who spent most of their working life in Youth Work and Child Protection.   That is why this film means a lot to me.   

 

Steve. A film about heroism.

  

Steve is Ciaran Murphy’s new film.   He stars in it and produced it, working with Max Porter as they adapted Porter’s novel Shy into this screenplay.  Murphy had already worked with Porter in the stage version of the novel Grief Is The Thing With Feathers,  and the short film All Of This Unreal Time.    Adapting the two novels  required considerable work, as they both used interior monologue, chaotic nonlinear time scales and in the case of Grief, poetry.  Shy also mixed in the jumbled memories of previous conversations and confrontations.    Shy is played by Jay Lycurgo, who previously worked with Ciaren Murphy on Peaky Blinders,  and consecutively follows the events of just 24 hours.

Steve moves the focus away from the initial narrator, Shy, a 16 year old boy living in a corrective school trying to cope with behaviour that other schools could not manage.   It is 1996.  Shy is a central character, but most of the time we follow Steve, the Head teacher.    

Why is Shy there? We are told that “He’s sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed his stepdad’s finger.”  Already expelled from two schools, his first caution came when he was thirteen, and this may be his last chance, as it is for other boy there.   Shy is depressed and confused.  His mother also suffers from depression and, it seems, can no longer cope with Shy in her life.  This is a desperate time for Shy. 

But Steve and his exhausted under-resourced staff are having a hard time coping too.    An intrusive film crew arrives, totally insensitive to the febrile atmosphere, the knife edge that too many relationships negotiate, or fail to negotiate.   Verbal and physical violence can break out at any time, with fearful possible consequences.     An MP arrives trying to engage in conversation with the boys, and win their support in the upcoming General Election – and have it filmed for propaganda.  Needless to say this does not go well. In the midst of this Steve seems to be suffering from PTSD after a car crash and resorts to pain killers and alcohol.    

This is not an easy film to watch, and it should not be easy.  There is so much pain, anger, sadness, despair, fear and confusion, but there are also moments of joy, hope and emotional intelligence, shown by both members of staff and the boys.    I remember Hemingway’s definition of courage as ‘grace under pressure’.    That rings true to me, and so did this film.    

In 1996, when this film is set,  I was doing group work in an establishment one rung lower down, in the place young men ended up when all other systems failed; a prison for ‘Serious Young Offenders’, seventeen and eighteen years old, many of them there because their uncontrolled violence had led them to commit GBH, manslaughter or murder.   I worked with some of them, with some Warders, and the Prison Chaplian.    And I was over whelmed by admiration for so many of them.     Not all Warders are brutes, many of them will do whatever they can to help their charges to be rehabilitated, to find hope and purpose in their lives.  And many of those young men were determined to do so themselves.   

I also came to see that the difference between many of those boys and myself came down to sheer luck.  In so many of their lives there came a time, maybe just 10 minutes,  when they could no longer cope with the pressures life had brought down on their shoulders.   The weight of their pain, anger, confusion and despair leading them to acts of hate and violence.   Acts they would regret for the rest of their lives.     I am sure that many other people are put under  such pressures, I know I one was, but we got through those 10 minutes – or however long they last – not by virtue or moral strength but by luck and  having previously been given the support we needed to survive.   Given, not deserved.  We all deserve it, but not everyone is given it.     

The boys and staff  portrayed in Steve are heroic.    I will write more, later, about the performances,  direction, music, camera work and script, but for now it is enough to say that this is a fine film, a grown up film, a Good Thing, a ray of light in the darkness and a beacon of hope in hard times.    It is not fun.  At times it is properly frightening.    It does not have a happy ending, in fact it does not really have an ending at all.  The 24 hours are simply over.  Another 24 hours will follow.   Things will not necessarily get better; in fact they will almost certainly get worse,  but for now we have come through and there is hope.

Why hope?  Because this is a film about love.   Not sentimental love, which is cheap, but about love-in-action, the love we call compassion, and that is always costly.     I urge you to see it.   We need more films like this.  We need more works of art like this.  We need more real life examples of the loving endurance portrayed in this movie.    My thanks to all involved.   

28 Years Later.

 

23 years ago Danny Boyle directed Alex Garland’s ground breaking script, 28 Days Later.   The  film was also ground breaking in its early use of digital cameras, and Cillian Murphy’s first lead role.    It also starred Naomie Harris (later Miss Moneypenny) Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston.  It was shot by Anthony Dod Mantle using the new lightweight Canon XL1 digital cameras to great effect.   Although often still called a Zombie movie, it was not about the ‘living dead’ but about folk infected with a Lab created virus called Rage that turned them into highly energetic, murderous and seemingly mindless people - and ones who could move very fast in pursuit.   One drop of their blood would infect anyone who came into contact with it in less than a minute.    Despite being  a horror movie, and a very popular and influential one, its deeper theme (as with many other ‘horror movies’) was that of family.    And the true monsters turned out not to be the ravening infected but the uninfected.     

 

A couple of years later the studio made a sequel, 28 Weeks Later, which did not involve Boyle of Garland.  It did not impress. 

 

28 Days Later, however, has maintained a loyal fan club, and when Boyle and Garland got the rights back some years ago they started thinking about a sequel of their own.     

So now we have 28 Years Later.   In this sequel Europe is free of infection, but the British Isles have been put into an enforced International Quarantine to contain the plague, with the uninfected  left to look after themselves.     One such group live on Holy Island, Lindisfarne, linked to the Northumbrian mainland by a tidal causeway, and thereby protected enough to survive.   The collapse of technology has virtually plunged them back 200 years.   With no electricity or communications they only have bows and arrows to protect themselves with when venturing across the causeway to forage, and to ‘blood’ their teenage boys, a rite of passage completed by killing some of the infected, reverting to some common tribal practices around the world and throughout history. 

 

This movie follows 12 year old Spike, played brilliantly by Alfie Williams (who some years ago had a small part in the BBC’s His Dark Materials).  His mother Isla, played by Jodie Comer, is seriously ill.   His father, Jamie, (Aaron Taylor- Johnson) takes Spike onto the mainland to ritually kill a Crawler, one of the kind of Rage victims that have regressed into being slow ground-hugging creatures living off insects, worms and grubs and posing no real threat to the Rage free.  But a kill is a kill, and killing is a rite of passage for these young males.   While on the mainland  Jamie tells Spike about the ‘Mad Doctor’ who still lives there.  As there are no Doctors on the island Spike resolves to take his mother to the Doctor, hoping he will cure her.   The Doc is played by Ralph Fiennes.   

 

The 3^rd Act includes a scene that knocked me sideways.   I say ‘sideways’ because grief is not something we leave behind us in the past.  It travels alongside us,  and that is why sometimes we can be knocked sideways into its presence.   When I left the cinema I thought that, brilliant as the movie is, I would never want to see it again.  A few days later, however, having got over my initial distress,  I decided it really deserves a second viewing.    The fact that it so moved me is surely testament to its quality.   The terrific script, superb direction and  profound performances held me tight, despite my not being a ‘horror movie’ fan.  And yes, this is a proper bloody, gruesome horror,  but like 28 Days Later, it is much more than a horror movie and again essentially about family – and so much more. I jut so happened that part of the ‘so much more’ impacted heavily on my own long held feelings of grief. 

 

As was said in another fine film, Rabbit Hole, (2010, Nicole Kidman, Miles Teller and Aaron Eckhart, written by David Lindsay-Abaire and directed by John Cameron Mitchell),    

 ‘Grief  can be like a boulder that falls on you.  After a while you manage to crawl out from beneath it.  Then you learn to carry it, and you do not want to put it down.  It is what you have.’  

 

So I do hope you will watch this film, and do so in a cinema, but be warned, it might impact you too.   Roger Ebert, the late revered film critic, famously said that movies can be 'empathy machines'.  They can help us understand how other people might feel.   But they can also put us back in touch with our own deepest feelings.   There is no harm in that as long as they are not traumatic.   And these films do not ‘make us feel’ something, they remind us that we do already feel that something.   

 

The only thing that distracted me was the confused geography.  Some will, I am sure, remember when in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman arrived on the Dover Beach and walked to Sherwood Forest via Hadrian’s Wall, and its now infamous Sycamore Gap.   In this film young Spike walks from Lindesfarne to the same Gap, and then past the ruins of the Angel of the North.   As it happens I know this territory well and  I really do not think he walked that far, and he never crosses the Tyne, which would have been necessary.   Danny Boyle says he showed the sycamore still standing to make the point that this is an ‘alternative’ future,  but the whole film is set in an alternative timeline.    England is not, and has not been, plagued by infected maniacs.    It temporarily broke the spell of my suspended disbelief.     When Jodie and Aaron had mastered the regional accent so well, and the Northumbrian Island was so clearly identified, I thought this was jarring and unfortunate.  Of course, those without a knowledge of the area will not notice,   and once again, this may seem to be a just a horror movie, but.      

 

The sequel has already been filmed and will, Danny Boyle says, be more about evil.  In the first movie the infected were not evil, they were deranged.   Sadly, we still accuse those who are dangerously aggressively mentally ill as being evil, even monsters.  We do so of course to separate ourselves from them.    They are ‘Other’.   Many people believe however that we are all capable of acts of terrible evil – and amazing goodness – in the right or wrong circumstances, without us being ill.  Just by being human. 

      

Going with the Flow

In Positive Psychology the term Flow is ‘a cognitive state where one is completely immersed in an activity — from painting and writing to prayer and surfboarding.  It involves intense focus, creative engagement, and the loss of awareness of time and self.’

 

Flow is also a 2024 animated movie, winner of the 2025 Oscar for Best Animated Feature film, produced in Latvia by Gints Zilbalodis.   In it we follow a Cat, first of all fleeing from a flooding river, then riding in a small abandoned boat down that river to the sea.   There is already a capybara in that boat, and then a Secretary Bird,  Labrador and Lemur join them.    We are given no explanation as to why there are no human beings to be seen, though they have clearly existed there recently;  nor how animals from South America, mainland Africa and Madagascar are together in this lush landscape; or where the film is set.  The river takes them to an ancient city with architecture  that looked similar to some in  Northern India, close by what might be volcanic plug hills, tall and narrow,   They also encounter a huge Leviathan, a whale like creature.    

 

So many puzzles, so few answers, and yet, just like the Cat, we go with the flow, completely immersed in the story.    I say story, but there is not much plot.   Things just happen.   Events flow in ways that seem entirely natural, but not didactic.   

 

The animals are hardly anthropomorphised.  They do not behave like humans.  I was however frequently reminded how we humans often behave like other animals.  Flow also reminded me that we often describe human beings who act in ways that are vicious, cruel or savage as being ‘like animals’, whereas some of us acknowledge that humans can be the truly vicious, cruel and savage species.    The creatures in Flow are not noble or heroic, but they do slowly learn that they are safer together than apart.        

 

There is, I think, only one way in which they demonstrate a skill that did not fit well with their natural capacities and limitations, but that did not distract me.  

  

The visual style of the animation rarely reminded me of any other film, though sometimes Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell anime came to mind, and at one point the Leviathan in Flow leaping out of the water echoed Ang Lee’s whale in The Life of Pi.      What is certainly true is that I joyfully went ‘with the flow’.   

 

The beautiful images, created by the producer/director Zilbalodis using the open-source software Blender, the music, which he co-composed, along with the tiny but cumulative details as these creatures slowly adapt to their situation and company, were more than enough beguile and carry me forward.    Cat’s journey is both interior and exterior, learning more and more about what it is to simply be.   

 

Three films I have really enjoyed seen in the last year or so  seemed to me to be unique.   Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, Jacques’s Emilia Perez and Zilbalodis’ Flow.   Each of these reminded me that most films are best made for the cinema, not for streaming, because the immersive cinema, or Movie House, is the place where they are most likely to evoke flow, a state of ‘self-forgetfulness’,  overcoming   our distractions, reaching past our defences and reminding our hearts and minds what it is to be human.    

Conclave

When I left the movie house after watching Conclave for the first time I felt a kind of elation.   I was delighted simply by having seen so well crafted a product.   Conclave deserved its host of nominations.   I enjoyed a second viewing more than the first.   I find that often happens.  Maybe familiarity helps me step back and see it more  critically, looking at how the team technically achieved their affects, and there is the added pleasure of anticipation of knowing what will happen next.  

Being a Christian Minister of the Liberal persuasion (far too liberal for many I am sure) my deepest appreciation of Conclave  came from its explicit theology.   I looked in the Robert Harris source novel to find 13 lines of Cardinal Lawrence’s homily on the essential need for doubt, and the way certainty is always exclusive, and so the mortal enemy of unity.   

 

I am of course aware of the opposition of conservatives in and beyond the Catholic Church to Conclave,  with many voices calling it ‘Liberal propaganda' .  Interesting the way the word propaganda is used by some to decry attitudes they do not agree with.   And ironic, as it originally referred to propagating the Church's own teachings abroad, via the College of Propaganda set up in the 17th by Pope Gregory XV.   So conservatives of any denomination calling this book/film 'liberal‘propaganda’ may not know their own history.    

 

‘Harris says that he was inspired to write a novel about papal politics while watching coverage of the 2013 papal conclave. At that time, he was working on his Cicero Trilogy, a series of novels set during the Roman Republic, and the papal electors reminded him of the Roman Senate. He consulted Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor as part of his research for the book. He later gave Murphy-O'Connor a copy of the novel, and to his surprise, Murphy-O'Connor sent a letter praising its accuracy.’   Wiki. 

I have seen Ralph Fiennes in three movies this year, starting with Conclave, then reuniting with Juliette Binoche 28 years after The English Patient in The Return, and coinicdentaly in 28 Years Later, playing respectively a Roman Catholic Cardinal, Odysseus and a post-apocalyptic Doctor. He has also filmed the second volume of 28 Years Later, to be released in January 2026.   At the moment (early July 2025) he is on stage in Bath in a David Hare play, Grace Pervades, and directing All’s Well That Ends Well which will run in the same theatre in August.    What a busy man!

  

Fancy some Tzatziki and Moussaka - or something even more classic?

 2,600 years ago, we are told by Professor Edith Hall in her introduction to Euripides’ play The Trojan Women, the brutal tyrant of Pherae in northern Greece left a performance of the play because he did not want people to see him weep.    I know how he felt.  

 

The Trojan Women is an amazingly feminist and pacificist play, and one that has often been performed during 20^th century wars.   It is a reminder that in so many wars most of the casualties are women and children.  A dear friend of mine, Ann Neville, directed it at Questors during the 2^nd Iraq war and asked me to curate the sound track, which I gladly did. The play has often been set in the location of a current conflict, as was Ann's.   

 

I recently got hold of the 1971 film of The Trojan Women directed by the Cypriot Michael Cacoyannis, who set it  amidst the ruins of ancient Troy.  He made Zorba the Greek in 1964, and two other Euripides plays, Electra in 1962 and Iphigenia 1977.   The Trojan Women were Hecuba,  widow of the Trojan King Priam and mother of Hector played by Katherine Hepburn (3 years after The Lion in Winter) played by Katherine Hepburn (3 years after The Lion in Winter); Andromache, Hector’s widow played Vanessa Redgrave (4 years after Camelot);  and Cassandra, Hecuba’s daughter, played by Genevieve Bujold (2 years after Anne of a Thousand Days).  Irene Papas ( 7 years after Zorba The Greek) as the Greek Helen.  

 

They are all now in the hands of the Greek victors,  the Trojan women doomed to be their slaves or concubines.     Each of these actresses was magnificent, the first three giving voice to  their own character’s grief (or in Cassandra's case, madness)  - plus Irene Papas' Helen,  so calm and haughty as she blames everyone else for the war, including her Spartan husband Menelaus who had foolishly left her alone in his Palace with the handsome Paris,  Aphrodite who had promised her to Paris as a bribe to win the Golden Apple , and even his mother Hecuba for taking him back into the Trojan Royal Household after having first of all abandoned him.    She did have a point.   

 

The opening scenes of the film seem rather chaotic, but so was the situation, and Cassandra was out of her mind, but then each of the other women have their time in the spotlight.   These actresses were all in their own ways beautiful as well as brilliant actresses, which added to the pathos.  (Should their beauty do that?   Maybe not, but for me it did!)      

 

One surprise for me was the appearance of Brian Blessed, then in his mid 30's, as Talthybius, the Greek Herald who has to tell each of the women their fate, and in Andromache's case the fate of her child, the son of Hector.   Brian Blessed had not yet become BRIAN BLESSED, and gave a really sensitive performance.  

 

Last year read Ferdia Lennon’s novel Glorious Exploits in which Athenian POWs in Syracuse are persuaded  to perform this  play, and heard Natalie Haynes’s praise for it – particularly for Helen’s outrageous speech – in BBC R4’s Natalie Haynes Stand Up For the Classics series.  Her knowledge and wit are a painless way to explore the Classics,  and are all available through BBC Sounds.    

 

There are now some wonderful and accessible translations of these plays and of the Homeric classics available, and in the last 20 years some female writers  have produced novels following in Euripides’ footsteps by telling the stories of women whose voices are rarely heard in these classics.   Margaret Atwood led the pack, as so often, with her 2005 novel The Penelopiad, and some of my favourites are Circe  by the American Madeline Miller and A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes.    Christopher Nolan’s film of the Odyssey is on its way, and Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche joined forces again nearly 30 years after The English Patient recently in The Return, telling about Odysseus’s homecoming after 20 years.  

 

People have not been telling and retelling these millennial old stories for no good reason.    They are tasty and satisfying when served fresh. 

My favourite movies of this century

 'The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many...movies.'  

In fact my favourite movies of this century.   24 years and a bit, just over 100 movies, so about 4 a year on average – see how discerning I have been?   Comments, reviews and longer articles about most of them can be found below. 

 

The movies are grouped (roughly) alphabetically - and I have emboldened my favourites – though if I did it again tomorrow some of these might be different, and I would kick myself for missing some that really should be there.   I notice that some movies that I previously listed as favourites are not there now, but time gives us perspective - and even within a few weeks I have revised this, prompted by the recent New York Times Poll of 21 c. movies, reminding me  of some terrible omissions.  

 

Why do it?  For my own benefit of course as an aide memoire, but also I hope it might jog your memories or attract your curiosity.  

 

And doing so reminds me  how lucky I am to live in a time when so many great filmmakers have been and still are making wonderful movies.       

 

About Time

Adaptation

AngelA

American Hustle

Amalie

Amy

Arrival

The Artist

Attack the Block

Anatomy of a Fall

Apocalypse Now: Redux 

Amsterdam

Barbie

Beasts of the Southern Wild

The Black Panther

Blade Runner: 2049 

Brokeback Mountain

The Beat My Heart Skipped

The BFG

Byzantium

The Bridge of Spies

Conclave

The Counsellor

Captain Fantastic

Changeling

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Cloud Atlas

The Constant Gardener

The Dark Knight

David Copperfield

Doubt

Dune

Dune Part 2

Dunkirk

One Battle After Another

National Theatre’s Everyman

Emilia Perez, 

Enola Holmes

Everything, Everywhere, All of the Time

Edge of Tomorrow (aka Live, Die, Repeat.) 

The Favourite

Flow

The French Despatch

Frankenstein (Del Toro 2025)

National Theatre’s Frankenstein (especially the one with Cumberbatch as the Creature)

The Girl with all the Gift

Good Night and Good Luck

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Gravity

The Great Gatsby

The Guard

The Handmaiden

Her

Hero 

Hidden

Happy

Holy Motors

I Am Love

National Theatre’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Inherent Vice

In The Mood For Love

The Incredibles

The Job of Songs

Joker

Kill Bill, 1 & 2

Knives Out

Kingdom of Heaven

Le Mans 66

Loving

The Life of Pi

Leave No Trace.

Let The Right One In,

The Lives of Others

Lord of the Rings

Melancholia

Magnolia

Mad Max: Fury Road

Mary Magdalene

Michael Clayton. 

Moulin Rouge

Mr. Turner

A Monster Calls

The Martian

MacBeth( Kenneth Branagh’s staged and Fassbender’s filmed versions)

Moon

No County For Old Men

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Only Lovers Left Alive

Oppenheimer

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Paddington

Paddington 2.

Petite Mamon

Pirates -  an Adventure with Scientists

Phantom Thread

Poor Things

Parasite

The Power of The Dog

RRR

The Road

Rocketman

Sound of My Voice

Sinners

Slumdog Millionaire

The Silver Branch

Silver Linings Playbook

Star is Born 

Skyfall

The Shape of Water

The Song of the Sea

The Three Burials

The Tree of Life

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 

Thirst

Toy Story 3

True Grit (2010)

Twenty Eight Years Later

Under The Skin

Up

Us

Volver

Wall-E

Whiplash

Winter’s Bone

What Happened, Miss Simone?

West Side Story

Yesterday

You Were Never Really Here

Zero Dark 30