Two films about Dads, Kids and making Art: HAMNET and SENTIMENTAL VALUE (2025)

(Doth spoilers too much)

It is a special moment when a moviegoer can see two films that have just as much that can appear different about them as they are tackling similar, deeply resonant themes and ideas.  

Of course, this happens at a coincidental time as both Hamnet (co-written/directed by ChloeZhao, starring Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as Agnes, wife and Mother two his children) and Sentimental Value (co-written/directed by Joachim Trier and starring Renate Resneve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as Nora and, again hey, Agnes, the grown children of filmmaker Gustav Borg played by Stellan Skarsgard) are coming out in theaters after successful festival runs during an awards season crammed with possible contenders for prizes and such.  But I happened to see these two films in as many days back to back, and it was striking how much despite the films taking place over centuries apart and different countries and under different Major-Traumatic-Tragic-Earth-Shatteringly-Existentially-Awful circumstances how they address two questions:  What can art do?  What is it for?   Again, no pressure.  

Again, it may be pure coincidence and as it happens two directors coming off of career highs (Zhao with Nomadland, we can just put Eternals in the corner right over there ok it is comfortable there, and Trier with the masterful Worst Person in the World), but they each have in mind to explore through these stories about great love and loss something that is of immense concern in this time of the 2020s.  Art, after all, is being sidelined to promote "content" (ironic side note, director Gustav Borg has his film-in-the-works funded by Netflix), and the idea that "anyone" can "create" art in a time where AI slop and data centers are carving holes in the mind and the world is something that should be combated.

Not to get all Ethan Hawke here (who one should add has his own incredible work with Linklater this season addressing the subject in its own theatrical way), but art, creating it and experiencing it, is good for humanity and good for the soul.  It is something that is of vital importance for an artist, whether it is working through something hard or working up the human spirit into fright or hysterics or into intrigue, and by just doing it it manages to at least put into some other context what it can feel like to go through heaven and hell and back, and for an audience, or for those participating with the artist to become storytellers or collaborators or whatever to call it, it carries equal weight.  I mean, how many times have you returned to a work of art to get that same thrill or pang of loss the first time around?  

Hamnet and Sentimental Value are about artists working through unimaginable loss (except, and here's the rub, it is not), and how it has to be done the way it is despite the lack of understanding and confusion over what the work will entail for those connected by family/blood to it.  

Where Hamnet is about the creation of a family for William and his headstrong, earthy and haunted wife Agnes, and what happens when one of his children is lost and how it leads to the creation of and first performance of maybe the GOAT of tragic theatrical works, Sentimental Value is about an aged filmmaker who approaches his mostly estranged actress daughter (no, not the one he once put in a film when she was little and she found that exciting because it was the rare time she got to spend time with her dad, the one who became an actor on her own, not thanks to him) to be the lead in a very personal new film project and, when she turns it down flat, how that leads to a) a hiring of an American actress (Elle Fanning) who is good but not *the* one for the role and b) how this leads to the insight that Gustav may have written this script about his mother who ended her life when he was a child... or so we think that is who it is about (dun dun).

As with any major good film it is how each story gets told in a particularstyle, and it is here worth nothing neither film may be exactly called perfect or even entirely great works.  There are some parts early on in Hamnet that can feel corny, where Zhao means to give the audience a fully immersion sense of things about how Agnes is connected with the natural world, like with a whole hive of bees she has on the property (!) and she even gives birth to her first child alone in the woods and has a nuclear meltdown when her mother in law (the incomparable Emily Watson, kind of underrated when it comes to awards talk by the way) who puts her foot down to having the next child (actually oops twins) in a similar method.

It is not at all that this early section is unsatisfying as it still features terrific direction and establishing Mescal and Buckley as these people firmly (a great moment: Will telling his future wife the tale of Orpheus in such a way that we understand how and why he was... Shakespeare, for god sakes).  And in Sentimental Value there is one moment involving a uh horse-drawn chariot on a beach that is kind of silly and a moment where Trier uh tries something involving melding the faces of Skarsgard and Renisve together in a close up that just takes one out of the movie.

All of this noted, these are extarordinary films for what they accomplish in looking at ideas of parenthood, being the spouse or a child of a tortured/"away" artist, and in taking things that should be too conventional or cliched to work and making it fresh and important again and even emotionally devastating.  

Hamnet is in a sense a vividly realized biopic, even though it is based off of a fictionalized novel by Maggie O'Farril, and we have not only seen those but even the idea of Shakespeare as a character and How Did This Get Made is nothing new (Shakespeare in Love).  Sentimental Value has an absentee drunk dad who made his kids miserable in various ways - in a particularly touching moment Nora asks Agnes how she didn't get messed up like she did and Agnes reminds Nora she has her to make her better - and is reenacting real events that happened to him to bring some kind of catharsis.  

But with Sentimental Value, for example, there is the crucial element of the Family House itself as the other, imposing sort of character of the film, as the house in fact is what is introduced first (Via narration of some long gone family member, maybe the grandmother, I am not sure) and the history behind it serving as not simply the backdrop but the text for the story: Gustav grew up in this house as did his daughter's, but so did his mother who, as we find out as Agnes does via research, was tortured during world War two and this must have created some deep wounds that could never heal (how much Gustav knew or didn't want to know is a key part of his character too I think, which he even transfers into his own script as he gets cagey explaining the Mother character - is it his own mother?  Nah, pshaw... I won't reveal who it may really be about as that is what you should discover if you do watch this).  

Actually, come to think of it, Hamnet has his house, too, which is where his loving twin sister Juliet gets the bubonic plague and seems on the verge of death, and when it turns out that it -gasp- he, not her, who will succumb to this wretched disease (which by the way, important detail, also took others of Watson's character's kids), and the house has its own haunted quality.  What, you say, could inspire someone to write a story like Hamlet about someone consumed by the specter of a loved one and how that presence consumes every waking moment of their lives and thoughts and heart?  A difference, to be sure, is that William moves his family out ot the home where he and Agnes raised their children, and Agnes's reaction to leaving makes for one of the best pieces of drama you'll see this year.

Hamnet, once it takes off, which is primarily once it jumps ahead in time and the kids are characters (including Jupe as the titular Hamnet, such a natural, moving performance, not a false note if he tried), is about how inexhaustible grief can be and how it is something that tears people apart.  Maybe, just maybe, art and the process therein can be what brings people together again.  Buckley is giving so much of her heart and energy into this role you almost worry once or twice she might burst a blood vessel in her neck or eye or somewhere; Mescal is equally good, especially as he shows Shakespeare's creative turmoil to be really unpleasant and something that most of us would not want to be around (how he line-reads the "get me to a nunnery" monologue is just about perfect - which offsets him giving the "to be or not to be" monologue while staring at water at night, kind of another corny bit that is just okay).

Sentimental Value from nearly the beginning is about wrestling with the discomfort that art brings to a sense of identity; note that it is really Nora and her struggle to get on stage to perform that starts off the film, not Gustav, and that may be coming from nerves or from the part or many other things (and what she asks of a stage hand to get her focused is shocking, but not as much that her relationship with her in regular life may not go as she planned), or just that she has mountains of anxiety to always if not overcome then compartmentalize.  A child of an absentee or even emotionally abusive parent will always find ways to compartmentalize, and it can be through art or just... not talking to anyone.  Renisve once again is so special in this film, as she was in "World" for how tender and vulnerable and frank she is and how subtle she brings those choices, like when Skarsgard offers her the script.

Skarsgard is also really strong here, mostly as someone who, this again is nothing new on paper, realizes he screwed up so much and it is hard to get another attempt or go at that (as another new movie out now about how fucked up artists and family can be, Jay Kelly, shows more explicitly).  What I love about his performance is that he is really kind and sweet, like to his grandson, and is not someone who means to do harm - at least anymore - but despite all of his health problems (perhaps kept a little too vague, but fine) and his feeling like he has been out of filmmaking for so long, he shows the range of showing Gustav as the man, like a lot of men, who will admit they were wrong about some things, but not enough and never about the deeper things, in a relationship with a child or whoever.  

I may have neglected to mention how Trier crafts his story and why it works and it is largely because he manages to make such natural dramatic scenes and exchanges (and occasionally very funny ie the IKEA bit) while also creating dizzying montages and looks into the past that adds to the atmosphere.  Zhao does this as well, though I think most will recognize that more right away since she takes cues from Malick and those visual poets for her mis en scene and cutting and music choices.  

But most importantly, both films and their makers find in the climaxes of the stories that when an artist makes something, like a play or a film or a script, the honesty in the work, what it says about the creator and the audience, is what pulls people in and together.  When Agnes gives Will that look on stage, and how he looks back in his full Ghost garb, it is almost a challenge for the scripted words (even from Hamlet) to match that meaning. And when sisters Nora and Agnes have their look after reading dad's script... my goodness.

In the end... Dads are gonna Dad.