Though Hamnet is concerned with bottomless grief and the unique power of art to express the inexpressible, it can’t help but telegraph its themes loudly and incessantly, its emotional register off-puttingly monotonous.
There’s a low-key warmth to Romvari’s painstaking portrait of quotidian family life, as her documentarian attention to detail creates an intoxicatingly vivid rendering of 1990s suburbia.
As Dracula wears on, its lack of focus starts to grate, while Radu Jude’s deployment of profane, disreputable dialogue and imagery starts to resemble a stylistic tic more than a genuine affront to his audience’s sensibilities.
It’s possible that a kind of objective moral ambiguity was the goal here, but given the sensitive nature of the material, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that the film’s vagueness is the calculated strategy of those unwilling to take a side.
