Review: Hamnet

In the opening moments of Hamnet, director Chloé Zhao seems to reach for transcendence. The wind moves through wheat fields, sunlight burns gently over the horizon, and two lovers watch in silence, their connection forming before our eyes. It’s the kind of delicate, tactile imagery that Zhao excels at, the kind that feels alive with breath and dust and human ache. Yet as the film continues, it becomes clear that Hamnet, her adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s beloved novel, is both a work of exquisite craft and frustrating calculation. It aches to be profound, and sometimes it truly is. But it also strains under the weight of its own importance, with a few odd choices almost derailing it.

Set in late-16th-century England, Hamnet traces the life of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), from their courtship through the devastating loss of their young son, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe). His death, likely from the plague, leaves an unfillable void, one that Zhao and O’Farrell’s screenplay imagines as the emotional origin for Hamlet. The premise is an act of speculation, yes, but one that proves potent: what if one of the greatest works in the English language began as a father’s attempt to immortalize his child?

It’s an undeniably romantic conceit, and Zhao treats it with sincerity. But sincerity, here, sometimes curdles into heaviness. The film’s middle stretch is consumed by the family’s grief, staged with an almost suffocating solemnity. Every flicker of candlelight, every slow dolly toward a tear-streaked face, feels freighted with symbolism. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who shot Cold War and Zone of Interest, brings a painterly precision to the imagery, soft light spilling across faces, pale linen fluttering in the wind, but his immaculate compositions also keep us at a remove. Why is the film shot from angles that make it feel like we are seeing surveillance footage at times. What was intimate and earthy in Zhao’s earlier work becomes, at times, pristine and remote. The pair here of director and DP never seems in sync, as if Zhao favored the wide shots for her actors but never considered the distance they create for the audience.

That remove is compounded by Zhao’s tendency toward emotional overstatement. The rare flashes of subtlety, a lingering shot of an empty chair, a glimpse of Hamnet’s twin sister Judith (Olivia Lynes) searching for her brother in the dark, speak volumes, but they’re often drowned out by overt gestures. A riverside scene in which Shakespeare, shattered, murmurs a fragment of “To be or not to be” feels especially strained, as though Zhao doesn’t trust the audience to connect the dots.

And yet, even amid such excess, the film’s heart never feels false. Mescal and Buckley bring a fierce immediacy to their roles, grounding the mythic in the domestic. Mescal’s Shakespeare is not the preordained genius of cultural imagination but a man flailing in the face of loss, his creative impulse born from helplessness. Buckley, meanwhile, gives a performance of astonishing control and ferocity. Her Agnes, a falconer, a healer, an outsider, hums with energy even in stillness. When she finally allows herself to break, it’s devastating.

If the film belongs to anyone, it’s her. Zhao builds Hamnet around Agnes’s experience of mourning, her fractured sense of time and faith. In one breathtaking sequence late in the film, she wanders the stage where Hamlet is being performed for the first time, realizing that her husband has transformed their shared agony into art. It’s here, at last, that Zhao finds what she’s been chasing all along: a vision of creation as both salvation and surrender. As Agnes watches the actor playing Hamlet speak to his ghostly father, she seems to understand that grief, when made visible, can be its own kind of resurrection.

The film’s final minutes, underscored, perhaps too predictably, by Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, achieve a staggering beauty nonetheless. They remind us that cinema, like literature, can make the private universal, that one family’s loss can echo across centuries.

Still, for all its splendor, Hamnet can feel like a film at odds with itself: lush and lifeless, intimate and overdetermined. Zhao’s empathy remains her guiding light, but the controlled, awards-friendly sheen dampens what might have been a rawer, more radical lament. And yet, when Buckley’s Agnes reaches for her lost son in those closing moments, the film finally exhales. It becomes what it has been yearning to be all along, not a monument to grief, but a communion within it.

3.5/5