Hamnet and Marty Supreme are all vibe, no story. Hollywood has lost the plot

How to process it all, the information that bombards us day and night? Our poor brains were not designed for this. Minneapolis, Iran, Venezuela, Keir Starmer and Grok – one damn thing after another. This is why we go to the movies. For story. To make sense of things. Alas, story now seems to have all but disappeared, replaced by – what else? – vibes.

Take Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, already raking in awards and nothing if not vibe-cinema. Maggie O’Farrell’s source novel is subtle and affecting, its form ideally suited to an in-depth examination of the repercussions of grief. On screen, however, we’re left with Feeling after Feeling, and not much else – besides wondering, isn’t Paul Mescal a bit old to be Shakespeare? Hamnet trounced Ryan Coogler’s brilliant Sinners for best drama and I’m starting to suspect that story – the good old what-happens-next? – is too often left for films lazily categorised as “thrillers” or “horror”.

Marty Supreme is another sinner, forgive me, in this vein. More subtly so, because it purports to be narrative-driven, but it’s so full of holes that the only thing you can invest in, if you choose to, is Marty’s vibe. Back in the 19th century, Anton Chekhov succinctly captured one of the cardinal rules of storytelling in a letter to a fellow playwright: “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” Chekhov’s Gun, as it came to be known, might here be renamed Chekhov’s Ping-Pong Ball. In Josh Safdie’s frenetic film, a vital piece of narrative machinery – Marty’s bright orange custom ping-pong balls, embossed with his name – ends up being, well, just a load of balls. But the vibes, man, the vibes.

A vibe-a-thon will always be more successful in arthouse mode: witness Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. A meditation on family estrangement and the meaning – always theatrical, to some extent – we imbue the spaces we inhabit, this is a film in which story needn’t do much heavy lifting. A brief scene in which Stellan Skarsgård’s feckless father attempts to wipe up a spill by smearing an entire kitchen roll over it is a brilliantly novelistic gesture: his rejection of domesticity, his total removal from the mundane and familial, compressed into a single action. It’s perfect. It’s a vibe. That’s fine. And of course it helps that the whole thing is in Norwegian.

Like many people, I’ve found myself returning to the films of the late Rob Reiner, sprinkling them in among these contemporary offerings: Stand By Me, When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men. Here is storytelling with clarity and emotional depth – and a quietly relentless forward movement. Perhaps we’ve turned away from this because the wider culture cannot help but mirror the scattershot nature of the 21st-century informational universe; perhaps those pulling the levers think this is what we want. Sometimes, maybe, but surely not always.

Story may be artificial, but that is the point: “artifice”, from the Anglo-French and Latin artificium, meaning craftsmanship or art, combining with facere, to do or make. Craft is a boat that lets us paddle through the torrents of the world. I, for one, am ready to climb back aboard.