My Oura Ring Thought I Was Asleep During 'Hamnet'

I wish! (October and November 2025 watches.)

Light spoilers for Hamnet and A House of Dynamite below.

Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in Hamnet. Photo: Screenshot.

Happy Thanksgiving! Hopefully at this moment you are secretly enjoying leftovers, having a weekend rekindling with your inappropriate high school crush, watching football (?), or in the mood to hear me complain about something. I love that the Hung Up anniversary is around Thanksgiving, because I truly am thankful for all of you. Now keep that in mind as you disagree with me in the comments about Hamnet.

Hamnet
New release
The sniffles and soft sobs of everyone in the movie theater watching Hamnet might as well be part of the movie’s score. Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of the novel Hamnet has a dead child, another dead child, a grieving mother, and an absent father — but does the book leave these people so stunningly non-specific? Who are these people, where have they come from, what do they want? Hamnet is as relentless as it is dull: Agnes (Jessie Buckley) screams through a series of difficult labor and deliveries, cries as she sends her husband (“Will” … iam Shakespeare, played by Paul Mescal) to live in London where she knows he’ll be happier, convulses in agony as she loses a child to illness, is despondant when she moves out of the house her son lived and died in. Every scene requires a corpse to have any emotional meaning. The only note here is suffering; Hamnet is color-by-numbers grieving, etch-a-sketch despair. It is stunningly underwritten and underthought. But it looks like a Serious Movie (Zhao used Cold War and Zone of Interest DP Łukasz Żal), and so somehow it has become one.

And I get that it’s sad. I get that it succeeds in its exceedingly emotional manipulations. But just once I wanted even a moment where these people weren’t being punished, just a second where we got a real understanding of character beyond “William Shakespeare” and “William Shakespeare’s wife.” (According to the Q&A I sat through after my screening, the script tries that little wink where the characters are given the most basic descriptions and not their very notable names. When Oh, Mary’s Playbill calls their male lead “Mary’s Husband” it elicits a chuckle. When Hamnet just calls him “Will,” it’s the equivalent of saying you went to school just outside of Boston and no, not MIT.)

The scene that moved me most was the one that came before all that torturous melodrama. Agnes is an outcast who feels most connected to the woods where her now-deceased mother gave birth to her. It’s in those same woods that Agnes gives birth to her first child. But Will’s mother (Emily Watson) watches pregnant Agnes pack to return to the woods to deliver her next baby, and basically barricades her daughter-in-law in their home. It is frightening and unnerving. Both women’s performances elevate this act of hostage to being unnatural. Agnes, interrupted, screams and deflates when she’s denied a sacred tradition that kept her connected to her lineage.

Hamnet might as well be called A Series of Unfortunate Events. This certainly looks like a good and serious movie, but Zhao’s usually measured and observant camera is only moved by meting out the most punishment possible. And that’s to say nothing of how thoroughly cornball it is to watch Will sit at a desk writing Romeo’s dialogue by hand or staring at the ocean, tearfully wondering “to be or not to be.”¹ Only when real Shakespeare happens — Noah Jupe onstage as Hamlet — does this movie get anywhere. By that point, though, it’s far too late. My Oura ring thought I was asleep during half of Hamnet, and for the first time, I wish I had been.

Speaking of sleep: Morning Pages, scroll, wake up Remy, check the group chat, LED red light mask, check the Hung Up chat ... I get all of it done in my Brooklinen bed sheet and waffle blanket combo. This Black Friday, you can get 25% off sitewide and up to 50% off bundles during Brooklinen‘s biggest sale of the year!

Bugonia
New release
Weird, feral, and darkly funny — Bugonia is the best Emma Stone-Yorgos Lanthimos movie since The Favourite. A pair of cousins on the fringes of society kidnap a healthcare CEO they believe is an alien, but their caper is a thriller, a comedy of manners, a satire, a tragedy. Jesse Plemons has never been better than in this movie, at turns skittish and maniacal. He’s a true believer in a cuckoo cause. Emma Stone is excellent too, a delight as a mercenary of enhancement, fluent in girlboss corporate deck jibber jabber. I loved this more than I thought I would.

It Was Just An Accident
New release
The ending. Oh my God, the ending.

Die My Love
New release
I wonder how I would’ve felt about this if I hadn’t seen a truly excellent movie about the despair that can come with having to be a child’s everything while your husband gets to do anything else. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was exquisite; Die My Love approaches alright.

In her New Yorker interview, star and producer Jennifer Lawrence said that they cut the parts of the novel this movie is based on where the wanton, depressed mother starts to hate her newborn. “Maybe that was a mistake,” Lawrence told the magazine. “But, once Rob and I started doing our scenes together, I think it became more of a thing that a lot of postpartum women feel, where you’re not mad at your baby—you’re mad at your fucking husband, who can just go to the gym.” I like her explanation in that interview more than any the movie provided. It feels like the movie’s obvious omission or blaringly discordant note. Jennifer Lawrence erupts with rage, resentment, a desperation to feel anything at all that isn’t the discomfort that attaches itself to her every move. The movie lands like a whimper. (It’s also clear that Robert Pattinson’s character, random and underwritten, was improperly beefed up to entice such an A-list actor. That’s not a jawline that exists in a small town, for one, and I think the husband as absent and unknowable might’ve been preferred to the lukewarm middle this character ultimately lands in.)

Georgia Rule
First time watch
A critical gap in my Lindsay Lohan filmography. Peyton referenced a line from this in a pod episode a couple of weeks ago, and I didn’t know what she was talking about. Lohan looks at a group of goody two-shoes who have been making her summer hell: “If you call me a name, if you throw something at me ever again … I will find all of your boyfriends, and I will fuck them stupid. Okay? Get it? Thanks, guys!” And for a moment, this otherwise forgettable family melodrama (a little bit like Hillbilly Elegy if JD Vance was ever cool) really soars.

Blue Moon
New release
I’ve watched many good movies about artists recently, the thrill and devastation that happen every single second when you try to create something worth seeing. (The Kanye doc, Peter Hujar’s Day, the Scorsese doc, even my rewatch of Broadcast News a couple of weeks ago.) Nothing about Blue Moon really made a case for itself as a movie and not a play, and no one is giving their best performance in it.

And yet! This movie, about Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) as he watches his composer, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), receive his best reviews of his career so far for a musical he made without Hart, is so lovely in its melancholy. There were a few turns of phrase so splendind that I wanted to write them down: I have written a handful of words that are going to cheat death … If I could write what’s in my heart this second, I would have the entire audience levitating. Oklahoma! would close in shame if it could hear eight bars of what’s in my heart … If I were a college guy, I think I would be afraid of you. This intelligent, mercilessly observant, wickedly unsentimental beauty sitting there evaluating me from somewhere behind those green eyes—annotating all my gaucheries … He had his eyes shut. As if he were trying to dream me into somebody he really wanted. All those words were worth the $20 I paid to see it at Nitehawk one afternoon. Ethan Hawke is miscast here as the petite, bitchy, gay, depressed romantic — a role that has never been so clearly meant for Stanley Tucci.

Wicked: For Good
New release
This really shouldn’t have been two movies. This sequel plays as a Broadway show’s second act, with scene after scene of denouement. A zippy sequence as good as “Wonderful” made me appreciate (and miss!) the magic of the first.

A House of Dynamite
New release
I was into this until the movie just kind of … stopped? Like it didn’t end, it just stopped and the screen went small and then Netflix recommended I finish House of Cards or whatever. A really puzzling ending that undercut the rest of the movie’s momentum. (I did spend half of the movie trying to figure out who the president was based on his voice. In some scenes, I was totally certain, while in others he sounded completely different. According to the credits, another actor performed some of the president’s dialogue. It was kind of a confusing but fun game to play since I didn’t know he was in this movie.) I will watch anything Moses Ingram is in, though.

More October and November 2025 watches: Marty Supreme, It’s Not Just You Murray, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Birth, Jay Jurden: Yes Ma’am, Manchester by the Sea, Black Angel, Rachel Getting Married, Jennifer’s Body, Oslo August 31st, My Blueberry Nights, Everybody Wants Some!!, and more.

1. Honestly, I could only see his delivery here as his audition to replace Austin Butler as Denzel’s favorite son. We know Denzel is a barb for The Bard!