Hamnet

by Mike McGranaghan

After the disaster of Marvel’s Eternals, director Chloé Zhao gets back on track with Hamnet, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel that purports to tell the story of how William Shakespeare wrote his classic play Hamlet. Zhao’s evocative style is a far better fit to the Bard than it was to superheroes. Getting into the film’s distinct groove can take a while – it finally clicked for me about 40 minutes in – but the rewards are worth having patience for.

Events are compressed, which is one of the things you need to get used to. Will (Paul Mescal) is a new-to-town Latin tutor who ends up kissing “daughter of a forest witch” Agnes (Jessie Buckley) mere minutes after they meet. By the next scene, they’re having sex, and soon after that, the couple is wed. You don’t get the typical relationship development most movies would offer.

That’s because there are bigger fish to fry. Will and Agnes end up with three children: daughter Susanna and, later, fraternal twins Judith and Hamnet. Trouble stirs up when Will keeps going to London to work on a new play, leaving his wife at home with the kids, and it hits a peak when one of the children dies from the plague. Suddenly, the marriage is pushed to the brink while Will’s play takes on an entirely different shape.

Hamnet is very much a film about grief and the different ways people process it. Like many of Shakespeare’s works, the tone is designed to be heavily dramatic. Zhao absolutely adopts the weighty feel of a classic tragedy. As such, the performances go big. Buckley, magnificent as always, has Agnes wear her emotions on her sleeve. Several times, the actress is required to break down onscreen, including a painful birthing scene and another where she realizes her child has passed. Mescal contrasts that by showing how Will internalizes everything. You can see the misery radiating heavily off him, even if he doesn’t always express it in words. The stars are excellent together, allowing the story’s meaning to hit home.

Without a doubt, the most controversial part of the film will be the last act, in which Agnes travels to see the premiere of Hamlet. I don’t want to reveal what happens in this extended sequence, except to say that all the thematic ideas the picture deals with come together metaphorically and with the sort of magical realism Shakespeare sometimes employed. It’s heavy-handed and certain viewers may be turned off by the unlikeliness of what transpires. But the finale is perfectly in line with the Bard’s storytelling method. Surrender to it and you’ll be touched.

Hamnet is undeniably a slower paced picture that has no use for subtlety or restraint. Its impact will be determined by each individual viewer’s tolerance for the approach, including the ornate dialogue. This isn’t the best film I’ve seen in 2025 by a longshot. That said, the strength of the performances, the potency of how it addresses grief recovery, and the sheer romanticism won me over.

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