All of the advertising for and critical response to Chloé Zhao’s prestige-season adaptationof Hamnet will lead you to expect a much shallower film than what it actually is. Having not read the novel myself, I’ve so far only understood Hamnet to be the weepie version of Shakespeare in Love: an Oscar-bait Hollywood drama about the death of William Shakespeare’s young child, Hamnet, the tragedy that inspired him to write the near-eponymous play. The loudest critical responses to the film adaptation have either been in praise of or in resistance to the ways that actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley perform that parental grief as Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes Hathaway, respectively. I’m enough of a sucker for period-piece melodramas that I would’ve been onboard for that relatively small story about one historically famous couple’s version of art therapy, but the film turned out to be much grander & fuller in scope than that. It hits on much broader themes about how we’ve all lost a genuine, Pagan relationship with the natural world and how making art can be a form of witchcraft that brings us back to it. And it only manages to do so by primarily functioning as Agnes’s story, not William’s.
We meet Agnes & William as young no-namers who are violently in love but haven’t yet fully established their place in the world. As much as they adore each other, their individual natures pull them in separate directions. William’s theatrical ambitions draw him to a busy life in The Big City, while Agnes thrives in the country woods as far away from London as she can get. The central conflict is not so much the grief that couple suffers when they suddenly lose their child to illness, but the dissonance in how they personally process that grief after the fact. A falconer & herbalist who’s viciously rumored to be “the daughter of a forest witch,” Agnes is in tune with the natural flow of life & death, but that flow is frequently disrupted by civilized townsfolk who drag her out of the woods and into the unnatural rituals of Christian society. She’s neither allowed to give birth in the way that feels natural to her (alone, standing in the woods) nor grieve familial loss in her own way (directly, without averting her eyes). When her young son dies and her husband fucks off to the city to continue his work in the theatre, she perceives the abandonment as his own close-hearted rejection of life & nature, lumping him in with the phonies who won’t let her simply be herself in the woods because it’s not Proper Behavior. It isn’t until she sees the resulting play William names after their son that she understands that he can only grieve through his art, and that his act of creation on the stage is its own form of witchcraft — however foreign to hers.
The final act of Hamnet—when Agnes is reunited with and says goodbye to her dead son’s spirit through her husband’s art—is powerful stuff. It cuts right through the knee-jerk cynicism that usually prompts me to dismiss the Oscar-hopeful studio dramas that flood the release calendar this time of year. In particular, I was moved by a shot of Agnes looking up to the stage at her son’s dramatic ghost that mirrors earlier sequences of her looking up to the flying spirit of a deceased pet hawk, illustrating in a small gesture the separate but parallel magics she & her husband practice. It’s that tension between the old & modern ways that makes Zhao such a strong fit for the material. Her docudrama filmmaking style is incongruous with the costume drama genre, but her security-camera modernity clashes with the Old World natural setting in a way that echoes the spiritual divide between Agnes & William’s respective worldviews. The only times the movie loses its way, really, are the brief moments when Zhao strays from Agnes’s POV to catch up with how William is getting along in the city. There’s an especially corny reading of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy that temporarily breaks the movie’s spell as William works out his feelings on his own, but that’s less the fault of Paul Mescal’s performance than it is a misstep in intellectual rigor behind the camera. Hamnetis only truly about Hamletin the final minutes when Agnes engages with that work from the audience pit, armed with Jessie Buckley’s trademark combative smirk. When it sticks with her, it soars. Thankfully, that accounts for most of the runtime.
This hazy dead space between Christmas and the New Year finds the boundaries between this world and the next at its thinnest, even thinner than on All Hallows’ Eve. That’s why Yule season is the perfect time to read, watch, and share ghost stories. It’s a tradition most faithfully observed in annual retellings of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and in annual British television broadcasts that never fully cross over to the US. While most households are streaming Hallmark & Lifetime Christmas schlock in their pajamas, we Yuleheads light a few candles and invite ghosts into our home through short story collections and the television set. It’s become my favorite Yuletide tradition in recent years, and it’s one more traditionally Christmasy than a lot of people realize. So, in order to help spread the undead Yule spirit before the holiday passes, here are a few short-form reviews of the ghost stories I’ve been chilling myself with this week.
The Uninvited (1944)
1944’s The Uninvited is the least Christmas-related film of this batch, but it’s ghostly & cozy enough to justify a Yule-season viewing. More of a cutesy radio play than a tale of the macabre, it tells the story of a weirdly chummy brother & sister who purchase a dilapidated seaside home that’s been left empty for years because it’s very obviously haunted. One local woman (a sheltered twentysomething who acts like a pouty teen) is especially distraught by the purchase, since her mother died there under mysterious circumstances that her new adoptive family must uncover before the ghost tosses her off the backyard cliff. The answer to that mystery mostly plays out like a dinner-theatre staging of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, but it’s worth sticking it out to see the film’s gorgeous, ethereal visualization of its cursed-real-estate ghost. While its Criterion Collection packaging presents it as a kindred spirit of much chillier, statelier 1960s ghost stories like The Haunting or The Innocents, The Uninvited is much gentler & sillier than that. It’s a mildly spooky amusement, which is perfect for this time of year.
Beyond Tomorrow (1940)
1940’s Beyond Tomorrow is even gentler & sillier than The Uninvited, with more overt ties to Christmastime besides its seasonal apparitions. Often retitled as Beyond Christmas, this public domain B-movie is a cozy, zero-conflict ghost story about how there are still a few sweetie pies left in The Big City: some living, some dead but lingering. It starts with a trio of Scrooges of varying grumpiness who are working late hours on Christmas Eve, when one decides to play a Christmas game. They each toss a leather wallet onto the New York City sidewalk with their address and a $10 bill inside to see if there’s anyone left in the city honest enough to return them. Two adorably naive youngsters return the wallets they find on the snowy pavement and the old-fogey roommates/business partners treat them to a Christmas meal as thanks. Then they collectively play matchmaker for the young couple, mostly from beyond the grave. The improbable trio of businessmen die in a plane crash at the end of the first act, then spend the rest of the movie acting as a ghostly Greek chorus. They do everything together in life, in death, and beyond.
Nothing especially dramatic happens in Beyond Tomorrow until the last-minute appearance of a sultry Big City temptress who threatens to break the couple up with her hedonistic ways. From there, it’s a minutes-long morality play that ends in gunshots and emergency surgery, but by then we’ve already seen three grumpy but kindly old men pass on to the next world without much of a fuss. Dying is just not that big of a deal. Mostly, the film is an excuse to hang around a Christmas-decorated luxury apartment with a small collection of ghosts in hopes that one of them might remind you of your own grandfather; or maybe one will remind you of a wealthy benefactor who baited you off the street with a prop wallet, whichever speaks closer to the life you’ve lived.
All of Us Strangers (2023)
2023’s All of Us Strangers is a much more dramatic Christmastime ghost story, although even its own sense of melancholy settles into an overall cozy mood. Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott stars as a lonely Londoner who’s living in a brand-new apartment building that otherwise appears to be entirely empty . . . except for the tempting presence of Paul Mescal as his more outwardly social but equally depressive downstairs neighbor. He staves off some of his loneliness by fucking that younger, livelier neighbor, but he mostly suppresses it by visiting his childhood home outside of the city, where he finds domestic comfort with the ghosts of his parents who died in a car crash when he was 12. Being older than the ghostly couple who raised him is already a surreal enough experience, but things get even more complicated when he comes out to them as a gay man, having to explain that it’s not really such a big deal anymore to Conservative suburbanites who died at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Then, the whole thing falls apart when he attempts to introduce them to his new situationship boyfriend, throwing his entire home/romantic afterlife balance into chaos.
Andrew Haigh’s low-key supernatural melodrama delicately touches on a lot of traditional ghost story beats in its grace notes, but it also loudly echoes how the isolation of modern urban living is a kind of ghost story that we’re all living every day. Our protagonist is a quiet, reserved bloke with no chance of making meaningful human connection from the voluntary prison cell of his one-bedroom apartment. All he can do is spin vintage New Romantics records and reminisce about the last few warm memories of his childhood, unable to fully enjoy the ways the world has gotten easier for gay men like him in the decades since. As a prestige drama for adults, it’s a little too Subtle, Restrained, and Nuanced for my personal tastes, but I still felt swept up in its melancholy Yuletide mood.
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight is much louder, flashier Christmas fare than All of Us Strangers or any other title on this list. It’s also not strictly a ghost story, so its inclusion here is kind of a cheat. Geena Davis stars as a small-town middle school teacher who suffers from amnesia, unable to recall her life before her cookie-cutter Norman Rockwell thirties in the suburbs. Her past comes back to haunt her, literally, after she appears in local TV news coverage of her town’s Christmas parade, where she’s featured waving from a float in an adorable Mrs. Claus outfit. A subsequent head injury in a boozy Christmas Eve car accident shakes her past self loose in her mind, prompting it to appear to her in a dream, cliffside, with her red curls cut & dyed into an icy Basic Instinct blonde bob. That eerie green-screen dream is a confrontation with the ghost of her former life – a supernatural showdown reflected in a magic dressing mirror that allows the two versions of herself to negotiate for control of her body. While they fight it out, snarling supercriminals from her violent past—having seen her on television—invade her suburban home, and she goes on an emergency road trip with a sleazy private detective (Samuel L. Jackson, in a Shaft-era blacksploitation wardrobe) to retake control of her life.
It turns out that the blonde-bob Geena Davis of the past was a lethally trained CIA agent whose murderous skills come back to the red-curls Geena Davis of the present one at a time, scaring her but also arming her to fight back against her attackers. During her road trip with her private dick, her trained-assassin ghost fully takes possession of her body, reclaims her preferred hairstyle, and sets up a precarious either/or decision where the Geena Davis of the future will either emerge a tough badass or an adoring mom. The Long Kiss Goodnight was written by Shane Black, who is very likely the pinnacle of Tarantino-era post-modern edgelords, which means it’s overflowing with sarcastic quips and emptied gun clips. It’s also very likely the pinnacle of Black’s work as a screenwriter, right down to his “written by” credit appearing over a pile of Christmas ornaments, celebrating his tendency to set hyperviolent scripts during the holiday. 90s action-schlock director Renny Harlan doesn’t entirely know what to do with Black’s excess of overwritten, flippant dialogue, but he’s at least smart enough to fill the screen with enough explosions that you hardly have time to notice. As a result, the movie is most recommendable to audiences who are frustrated that Die Hard isn’t as Christmasy of Christmastime action-movie programming as annually advertised, more so than it is recognizable to audiences looking for a Yuletide ghost story. There is a ghost story lurking in its DNA, though, because a Christmas traditionalist like Shane Black can’t help but acknowledge that essential but overlooked aspect of the holiday.
Since the New Orleans Film Festival ended in early November, my inboxes (both physical and virtual) have been overflowing with FYC Awards Screeners. Within the two-hour span of pressing play on a movie and checking my phone during its end credits, I’ll have received two or three more titles fighting to make their way into my eyeballs. It’s an unrelenting flood of #prestigecontent presented in low-res, watermarked glory. As much as catching up with this season’s “Best of the Year” contenders (some of which won’t reach wide distribution until early 2023) before this month’s SEFCA vote can feel like a marathon homework session, it has been pretty illuminating about how these year-end lists take shape. I always wonder how the 100+ new releases I see every year are whittled down to the same 15-20 titles repeated & rearranged on pro critics’ & voting bodies’ “personal” Best of the Year lists, even though they presumably watch even more new releases than I do. The answer, apparently, is marketing. The FYC discs & emails sent directly to critics’ doorsteps are a huge part of the narrowing-down process. Since I haven’t received any FYC screeners for some of my personal favorites of the year (so far)—Neptune Frost, Inu-Oh, Mad God, Jackass Forever, etc.—I’m meant to assume there’s no way to build momentum for their nomination, and thus voting for them will essentially be a waste of my microscopic modicum of clout. It’s frustrating that money & marketing are the answer to the mystery of how critical consensus is formed, but in retrospect I should’ve assumed that was the case from the start.
The reduction effect of movie marketing doesn’t start with Awards Season screeners, though. It’s a year-long process, starting with the Sundance Film Festival in January and picking up steam during Cannes in the spring, months before reaching its FYC screeners crescendo. For instance, take the small, intimate, festival-circuit drama Aftersun, which is currently being marketed as a formidable awards contender by A24. Every single film festival of merit—from mid-tier conversation starters like Sundance to the cultural juggernaut of Cannes to the regional community events like NOFF—are overstuffed with movies exactly as substantial as Aftersun. Most of those films do not land proper distribution and are never heard from again outside a few stray critical raves in their festival roundups. Aftersun is one of the lucky ones; it made it past the first, second, and third rounds of marketing-driven consensus culls, premiering to ecstatic enough reviews at Cannes that it’s now being shipped out to critics’ homes with an official FYC stamp of approval. Maybe this process is necessary. Maybe if no one was able to peek over their shoulder at each other’s homework, there would be no room for consensus at all, as Aftersun would be competing with hundreds of other slice-of-life indie dramas on its budget level instead of dozens. Either way, I still often find this year-long ritual bizarrely arbitrary, as I cannot personally tell the difference in quality of what Aftersun achieves vs. the intimate, small-scale dramas I catch at NOFF every year that never reach theaters outside the fest.
If I’m avoiding talking about the movie itself here, it’s because there isn’t much to it. Charlotte Wells’s debut feature is a stubbornly understated, bittersweet nostalgia trip – time stamping its period setting with “Macarena” dance routines & MiniDV camcorder footage. Paul Mescal stars as an emotionally troubled, recently divorced father of one. His blackouts, arm cast, and meditation techniques suggest he’s struggling with either anger or addiction issues, but we don’t get the full story. Instead, we ponder him through his preteen daughter’s precociously discerning eyes like an exotic zoo animal. She is embarrassed by her dad’s tucked-in t-shirts and cheesy dance moves, but she can’t quite pin down what’s happening in his mind. So, we can’t either. He consciously teaches her how to do new things the way a proper dad should, but subconsciously condescends to her the entire time in a way that maintains a cold, emotional distance. There are also things she has to learn on her own, observing the zoological mating rituals of the older teens who stalk around their getaway vacation resort. Her digi camcorder footage adds layers of innocence, nostalgia, remorse, and alien fascination on these teen & adult behaviors, with no pressure put on what any individual scene means with the larger-scope, slice-of-life story. Mostly, we just spend a few days with a somewhat troubling, somewhat adorable father-daughter duo, wondering if the dad’s occasionally sentimental treatment of his daughter as his “wee poppet” is enough to outweigh the emotional damage of his frequent recesses into his insular, dark moods.
There are distinguishing touches to Aftersun that might explain some of its continued critical acclaim beyond the festival circuit. There’s a strobelit framing device that appears to be set in a modern-day nightclub, but gradually reveals itself to be some subliminal dungeon of the grown-up daughter’s mind where this ghost image of her father still dwells. It’s a psychic space that grows in its onscreen significance as the movie closes in on its final ten minutes, which leave you feeling as if you’ve watched something much grander & more emotionally impactful than a modern reenactment of 90s home video vacation footage. The two main actors—Mescal & Frankie Corio—also put in excellent, measured performances throughout, never straining the father-daughter intimacy of individual scenes to reach for anything grandly melodramatic. It’s a good movie. I just don’t know what to say or feel about it beyond that, because it’s not an especially unique one, no matter how personal it may feel to its director. Refer to the closest film festival near you to see more solidly Good films just like it, and refer to future year-end lists and televised awards ceremonies to see which ones got a decent marketing push.
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