Real Lives, Real Stakes: Three Films That Put History (and Humanity) on the Big Screen
Every awards season throws up a theme, whether the organisers intended it or not. I’ve already talked about grief being a main theme of this year but another thread has kept tugging at me: real people, real events, real consequences. Hamnet, I Swear, and Nuremberg are very different films—one is intimate and domestic, one modern day and visceral, the last grand and courtroom-bound—but they share a fascination with what it means to live through the kind of history that doesn’t feel historical when you’re in it.
Note: Click the pics to go thought to the trailers for each film.
Let’s start with Hamnet, which pivots Shakespeare out of the spotlight and gives it to Agnes (often called Anne), the woman who married him, mothered his children, and kept a home while he wrote himself into immortality. There’s something wonderfully corrective about this perspective: the film reminds us that genius rarely flowers in isolation; it’s fed, clothed, and occasionally told to get on with it by someone with calloused hands and a sharper sense of reality.
Jessie Buckley is the reason this works as well as it does. She plays Agnes with a kind of grounded quality—never saintly, often stubborn, always human. You believe she can pluck a chicken, barter for seeds, and look straight through her husband’s excuses. Her scenes have texture; even the quiet moments feel lived-in. The production design helps: the sets and costumes are richly tactile without shouting, and you can almost smell the smoke from the hearth.
I wasn’t entirely convinced by Paul Mescal’s Will. Plenty of people will adore him, and I can see why—there’s a gentle melancholy he carries off with grace. And the film doesn’t need him to grandstand; it needs him to be the partner against which Agnes’s choices and losses are measured, and on that front it mostly delivers.
What struck me most is how Hamnet folds grief into daily life without making it a slogan. The death of their son isn’t played as a single moment— like real grief, it’s more like weather that moves in and never quite clears. The film earns its emotion scene by scene, with small gestures and the stubborn survival strategies of people who have already lost more than they can say.
I Swear: The body won’t behave, the world rarely helps
I Swear was the surprise of the trio, it plunges you into the reality of living with Tourette’s syndrome, and does so with a rigour that refuses sentimentality. The lead performance is extraordinary—so present and precise that I genuinely thought the actor must be Scottish with Tourette’s himself, only to discover he’s from the South East and performing with astonishing control. The craft is invisible in the best way: you don’t admire technique so much as feel for a person whose body insists on being noticed when all he wants is to be left alone.
The film’s nerve lies in its willingness to show the social fallout. The scene in which he’s beaten up is horrible—almost unwatchable—but necessary. It’s not violence as spectacle; it’s violence as the logical, ugly end of a thousand small misunderstandings, a thousand moments in which the world decides that difference is insult. You wish, absurdly, to reach into the screen and rearrange the strangers’ faces, or at least the one person who might say, “He can’t help it.”
There’s also a surprising, sardonic streak that saves the film from becoming an endurance test. The humour is observational, never at the expense of the protagonist, and it acknowledges the daily negotiations that those with visible conditions must make. Dates, job interviews, bus rides—ordinary life becomes a set of calculations: Will this person understand? Can I explain it in time? Do I have the energy? The film respects the maths without wallowing in it.
It’s tempting to talk about “awareness” in connection with I Swear, but that’s too tidy. Awareness is what you get after empathy has done its work. The film forces empathy upon you by refusing to make the main character a symbol. He is particular and sometimes difficult, and that’s the point. If you leave the cinema understanding even a fraction more about what it costs to move through the day with an unruly body, that’s the film doing what art does: enlarging the circle of what we’re willing to consider human.
Nuremberg: The theatre of justice, and its limits
Onto Nuremberg, which shoulders heavier historical furniture and does a decent job of not getting crushed beneath it. Courtroom dramas always risk feeling like lectures with wooden desks, but this one remembers that trials are theatre—high stakes, harsh lighting, and the human habit of playing to an audience even as the docket is read.
Russell Crowe’s Göring is the showpiece here, and he’s frankly very good. There’s a dreadful charisma to the man that Crowe captures without excusing: the manipulations, the serrated wit, the calculated pauses. You wouldn’t want him at your dinner table, but you understand why others did—a chilling reminder of how evil often packages itself in intelligence and charm.
That said, I wasn’t entirely convinced this was the definitive telling of Nuremberg. The film’s heart is in the right place—earnest about the importance of accountability, clear-eyed about the bureaucratic banality of atrocity—and the important point that it can happen anywhere. The quote from R.G. Collingwood at the end of the film : “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done”. Is the thesis of the piece. We may believe “never again” but we need to be vigilant.
There’s value in the attempt. In an age heavy with disinformation and light on patience, Nuremberg reminds us that facts can be theatrical without being false, and that the spectacle of justice—the staging, the rhetoric—doesn’t invalidate its purpose. Indeed, ceremony is one of the ways we take evil seriously enough to bind it in words we can live by. The film might not close every debate, but it nudges them back into public view, which is no small service.
A thread through all three: when history gets personal
Watching these films back to back, what binds them isn’t simply that they depict real people and events. It’s that they frame history as something felt in kitchens, on buses, and in courtrooms where eyes meet across tables. Hamnet shows how private grief can shape public art. I Swear insists that a diagnosis is not a costume but a daily negotiation with the world. Nuremberg asks whether justice can ever catch up with what men are capable of when they decide that other people are an idea rather than a reality.
You might appreciate that these films sit on different shelves but speak to the same impulse: to witness. Not to romanticize the past, not to flatten the present, but to look and name. We were there. Or if we weren’t, someone was, and we can stand close enough to listen.
Recommendations (with the light touch of humour we promised)
- Hamnet is for anyone who has ever wondered about the person standing just out of frame in the famous portrait. If you like your history with mud on the hem and emotion unfolding in small, stubborn moments, it will suit you down to the ground. If you go with a Shakespeare fan, prepare to have a lively debate afterwards about whether Will would recognize himself here, or simply take notes.
- I Swear is powerful and sometimes punishing. Bring someone kind, and possibly a handkerchief. If you’ve ever tutted at a stranger for making noise in a quiet place, this film will sit you down and have a word. It’s not homework, though; it’s art with a pulse.
- Nuremberg is worthwhile, particularly for Crowe’s chilling turn and the reminder that justice is a practice as well as a principle. If you’re in the mood for nuance, you’ll find plenty. If you want one clean narrative, you may bristle—but then again, the historical record isn’t tidy, and perhaps neither should the film be.
A final note: these films benefit from discussion. If your post-film ritual involves a cup of tea at home or a late supper, lean into it. Hamnet invites conversation about partnership and grief; I Swear about patience and public space; Nuremberg about the sanity (and necessity) of institutions.
In a year where cinema keeps returning to what actually happened—and who it happened to—these three films remind us why we keep sitting in the dark with strangers: to see real lives enlarged, not to make them unreal, but to make them visible.
