So I was cautiously excited for this movie. Excited because I’m a big Chloé Zhao fan (Nomadland is great and Eternals is mostly a failure because it’s too determined to be an MCU movie, which isn’t entirely her fault), but cautiously because the premise of the movie sounds like it could too easily descend into manipulative, weepy melodrama. And, alas, it does.

Which is disappointing, because the beginning of the movie is interesting. Agnes Shakespeare, the protagonist who we meet as a girl before she’s a Shakespeare at all, is a witchy, somewhat wild woman, portrayed memorably by Jessie Buckley. She’s a great character, and the part that involves her meeting and getting together with Billy works well, as does the portrayal of their family life in the countryside and the tensions that come between them as he goes off to the city to be a playwright.

But when the plague comes around, it goes downhill.

Spoilers, I guess

So the plague taking the titular Hamnet is obviously expected, which means it has no real emotional punch in itself. What could make it powerful is how the characters react.

For the most part, we just get the sort of normal grief that you’d expect, but since the whole premise of the movie is that this death is motivating Hamlet, we need to see that connective tissue. So we get Billy standing by the river considering suicide and then creating the “to be or not to be” speech, which is honestly just embarrassingly cheesy. And the big ending is Agnes seeing the play and understanding how he translated his grief into art, verbalizing it aloud for the movie audience. It’s beautifully done, it’s well-acted, but it’s just manipulative as hell, and it didn’t pull me along hard enough that I could get past that — not least because the ending cuts to Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” which is absolutely superb music and in a vacuum would be perfect here, but also is super-overused and maybe someone should have told Zhao about Arrival?

There are probably people out there who did get swept into this narrative — maybe they knew less about the subject and so events hit them as a surprise, maybe they’d never read Sandman (which I think did this storyline better), maybe they’d never heard Richter’s music before, whatever — but it didn’t work for me, so this lands at well-crafted mediocrity, the kind of thing that would have won a Best Picture Oscar in like the King’s Speech era, but deservedly did not these days. Buckley winning a Best Actress award, though, is fully justified, and her performance is honestly the best reason to see the movie.