Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, “Hamnet” is an emotionally pulverizing drama that imagines how the death of William Shakespeare and Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway’s only son might have inspired the creation of his greatest tragedy; think of it as “Shakespeare in Agony.” And yet the violent beauty of this film, which rips your soul out of your chest so completely that its seismic grief almost feels like falling in love or becoming a parent, is that it’s as much about the experience of having a child as it is about the experience of losing one.
More to the point, “Hamnet” is a wrenching story about how those two experiences — so unalike in dignity — might ultimately be catalyzed by the same process of emotional transfiguration. In the first, your heart is placed into someone else’s body. In the second, that body is subsumed into the world. To create anything, be it a person or a play, is to give a piece of yourself a life of its own; a life that you will never again be able to control or keep safe. It’s to risk the infinite potential of an offering over the unborn reality of an idea, and to accept how even something that looks just like you can grow to assume unimaginable shapes. The author dies so that their work can be reborn anew forever.
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In that light, one of the great strengths of O’Farrell’s novel is how the lightly historical context it invents around “Hamlet” refuses to align with the play’s general plot and most obvious themes, and Chloé Zhao’s film — which she co-wrote with the author — respects how that 2+2=5 approach begs for a different kind of equation. Unlike “Shakespeare in Love” (a masterpiece), “Solo: A Star Wars Story” (not so much), or any other examples of modern day origin stories, “Hamnet” doesn’t reverse engineer its drama from the stuff of its ultra-familiar source material. Sure, there’s a brief aside in which Will (Paul Mescal) jots down the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet” after his first kiss with Agnes (Jessie Buckley), and a later moment where their three children roleplay as the witches from “Macbeth” on some gray English morning, but never does this movie rely on the lizard-brain thrill of recognition in order to stand on the shoulders of giants.
On the contrary, “Hamnet” derives its simple but overwhelming power from the disconnect between intention and response; it’s a film that plants its roots in the liminal space between them, and keenly observes how the same kind of no man’s land can form between a husband and a wife just as easily as it does between an artist and their work. By that measure, it would be hard to imagine a more fitting tribute to Shakespeare’s most widely interpreted play.
When the story begins in 1580, Will and Agnes are both arrestingly self-assured. He’s a poor and scruffy Latin tutor whose interest in words, words, words makes him a “useless” disappointment to his domineering father (like Agnes’ severe mother-in-law played by Emily Watson, Will’s father isn’t hateful toward his eldest child so much as he is afraid to love him, lest the world decide to take him back). She’s a mystical “forest witch” whose fascination with falconry — and broader attraction to communing with the non-human world — makes her stand out from her family even more than the blood red dress she wears in a world of medieval gray. Will abandons his students at the first sight of Agnes walking by the classroom window, and the two of them are sucking faces a minute later. She makes him feel giddy, and he makes her feel destined. (Will proposes to Agnes by circling her like a child playing duck, duck, goose, a funny bit of blocking in a film that’s always careful to let enough light shine through its potentially oppressive darkness). They each see a vision of the world in the other.
Needless to say, Zhao’s signature naturalism serves Agnes well. We first see her curled up in the tree hollow where she’ll eventually give birth to her eldest daughter, and the elemental nature of Łukasz Żal’s cinematography allows her to retain that sense of earthiness wherever she goes. By a similar token, that stark visual language — complicated by Zhao’s stately framing and related inclination toward surveillance-like interior shots that suggest the presence of a ghost looking down — helps to disabuse the drama of any potential staginess. Ditto the plainspoken dialogue, the wind that groans outside the Shakespeare family’s house like an empty stomach, and the delicate Max Richter score that doesn’t intrude on the drama until the film’s nuclear-grade sobfest of a finale, which skirts dangerously close to emotional pornography as Zhao cues up the composer’s most famous track. (Tear-jerkers come and go, but it’s rare to see a movie that feels like it’s farming you for moisture.)
Anyway, for a fictionalized story about famous historical figures, “Hamnet” is uncommonly attuned to the base immediacy of their feelings. With actors like these at Zhao’s disposal, it would have been a tremendous waste for the movie to focus on anything else. Anchored by the primordial rawness of Buckley’s astonishing performance, “Hamnet” is never the least bit at risk of reducing Agnes to a trope. If anything, the film regards her as an even more powerful creative force than her husband; Will scribbles plays offscreen while Agnes sweats, screams on all fours, and shouts at the fates as she gives birth to their three children.
The kids grow up to embody the best of their parents, with Zhao paying special attention to the bond between twins Hamnet and Judith (Jacobi Jupe and Olivia Lynes, both terrific), who play together by swapping identities and trying to fool their parents. It’s a fun Shakespearean flourish, of course, but one that lingers here for the casual sense of transference that it seeds for the semi-fantastical heartache that follows when Hamnet volunteers to absorb his sister’s plague. Without exaggeration, the image of the cherubic eight-year-old boy standing lost in the bardo against a backdrop of painted trees is among the most devastating things that I’ve ever seen in a movie (where did he go?), and I spent the remaining hour of “Hamnet” feeling as if the weight of death itself were crushing down on my chest.
Zhao is careful not to gild the lily (that “On the Nature of Daylight” needledrop notwithstanding), but her Shakespeare doesn’t exactly need a lot of runway to make his loss feel like your own. Between “Aftersun,” “All of Us Strangers,” and the upcoming “The History of Sound,” no actor in the last five years has made me cry more than Paul Mescal — not because he’s so fucking good at playing wounded, but rather because he’s even better at playing the hurt of someone who doesn’t know how to heal themselves.
His performance in “Hamnet” is so cathartically transcendent because it at last rewards that search, a search that here extends beyond this world — if not the Globe — as Will starts looking for his son in the space between life and death. The pliability of English drama’s most famous speech allows the suicidal dilemma of “To be, or not to be” to double as an invitation to reject its binary proposition, as the movie doesn’t invoke it until it’s clear that — so far as his increasingly estranged parents are concerned — poor Hamnet is being and not being all at once. He isn’t there, but he isn’t not there either. “He can’t have just vanished,” she and her too-absent husband both agree, though they have very different ideas as to where he might have gone.
If “Hamlet” is typically considered to be a revenge story first and foremost, the extraordinary final sequence of Zhao’s film (which is much less open to interpretation), maps a different meaning onto “the undiscovered country” that lies beyond this mortal coil — one that may not align with Shakespeare’s intention, but nevertheless hears a resonant stir of echoes in the silence at the end of the show. Hamlet and Hamnet may sound very different to our ears, but as the film’s opening title card reminds us, they were interchangeable names at the time.
As we see “Hamlet” performed for the first time with Agnes and her brother (Joe Alwyn) in the audience after months of not speaking to Will, the play metamorphosizes before our eyes into a vehicle for mutual communion between the griefstricken parents. Will’s agony takes brilliant and uncontrollable new shape on the stage of the theater, while Agnes’ heartache is given the conduit it so urgently needs by virtue of how she projects her own pain onto the performance.
Just as Hamlet begs Horatio to live on and tell his story, “Hamlet” finds Will pleading with Hamnet to do the same. This tragedy may not be the fate that either the playwright nor his wife ever wanted to imagine for their only son, but his story was never theirs to tell, nor could it ever hope to mean as much to anyone else. Because of “Hamlet,” that angel-faced little boy will die again a million times over for centuries to come. But in that sleep of death and what dreams may come, he will be reborn just as often, his memory rendered eternal across a more brilliant future than even William Shakespeare could have written for him.
Grade: A-
“Hamnet” premiered at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival. Focus Features will release it in theaters on Thursday, November 27.
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