Chloe
Zhao’s Hamnet begins with a simple promise. Keep your heart open. By
the end of its two-hour journey, that heart will be shattered, rebuilt,
and cracked open again in ways that feel deeply human and intensely
cinematic. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, this film is not a
reenactment of Shakespearean lore or a behind the scenes look at the
creation of Hamlet. It is instead a visceral meditation on parenthood,
loss, and the mysterious alchemy through which tragedy becomes art. If
Nomadland was Zhao’s soulful drift across an America filled with quiet
longing, Hamnet is her plunge into emotional depths that are both
intimate and mythic.
If you ask me to name two of the finest young
actors working today, two performers who could make me cry with shocking
ease, I would immediately say Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. Both have
demonstrated again and again that they can reach a place of emotional
truth that feels almost telepathic. I have cried through their
individual work, but together they form something nearly overwhelming.
Buckley and Mescal are unbelievable here. The sorrow that pools in their
eyes, the raw ache that trembles in their voices, the way their bodies
carry the weight of grief that cannot be expressed in words, all feel
torn from the deepest corners of lived experience.
The story is
rooted in speculation, but it never feels speculative. It imagines how
the death of William and Agnes Hathaway Shakespeare’s only son might
have shaped the creation of Hamlet. Yet Zhao wisely refuses to turn this
into a neat origin story. This is not Shakespeare in Love. This is not a
scavenger hunt for winks at future plays. There are small nods, like
Will jotting down early lines of Romeo and Juliet after his first kiss
with Agnes, or the children playacting as the witches from Macbeth, but
none of it feels like narrative elbow nudging. The film draws its power
from something far more complex than recognition. It emerges from the
liminal space between intention and response, between creation and
consequence, between a husband and a wife who love each other fiercely
yet cannot seem to step into the same emotional room at the same time.
One
of the most striking qualities of Zhao’s approach is how she treats
grief not as a plot point but as a lived ecosystem. Hamnet’s death
becomes the axis around which the film rotates, but Zhao never exploits
the tragedy. She does not wallow. She observes. She listens. She watches
how a family rearranges itself around an absence. How silence takes on
new shapes. How sorrow becomes a language that parents speak differently
even when they are describing the same event. This is a film that
understands that to have a child is to place your heart inside another
person’s body. To lose a child is to have that heart swallowed by the
world.
This emotional intensity is anchored by astounding
performances from every member of the cast. There are going to be
countless conversations about Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, and every
one of them will be warranted. Buckley gives a soul shattering
performance that ranks among her best. There is something elemental
about the way she grieves. She is tender, feral, intuitive, exhausted,
and unbreakable all at once. Mescal continues his relentless pursuit of
playing the saddest and most broken men alive, and this might be his
magnum opus. His Shakespeare is not a mythic genius but a man of bruised
pride and enormous love who proves incapable of saving the people he
cherishes most. Even when he is absent, his presence is felt in quiet
gestures, in the ache of unwritten letters, in the fear that he might be
losing the family he longs for but cannot remain beside.
Yet the
performances do not end with the adults. Jacobi Jupe delivers one of the
best child performances in recent memory. There is a clarity in his
eyes, a gentle bravery in his choices, and a sense of spirit that
lingers in the air long after he disappears from the frame. He is
magical and sincere. He left me devastated. Noah Jupe also has a
significant moment that arrives like a lightning strike. It is a brief
sequence but deeply affecting. The Jupe brothers together remind us of
how fragile and luminous childhood can be.
Zhao’s craft is as
deliberate as it has ever been. She orchestrates every scene with
precise intuition. The pacing is unhurried, allowing moments to bloom
slowly, almost ritualistically. Lukasz Zal’s cinematography is
breathtaking. The woodland imagery in the first half carries a fleeting
beauty that ripples with foreshadowed pain. Light filters through trees
as though Agnes herself is tethered to the land. Soil appears
everywhere, not as decoration but as metaphor. It lives beneath
fingernails and clings to hems and fills the spaces where words fail.
This deep connection to the natural world becomes Agnes’s spiritual
spine. She is often dismissed as a forest witch by those who do not
understand her, but Zhao frames her communion with nature as a source of
strength rather than superstition.
Max Richter’s score is
extraordinary. Even the familiar pieces feel reborn here, filled with
new anguish. The music amplifies every gesture, every breath, every
stifled sob. Some might argue that the score does too much of the
emotional lifting, especially in the darkest moments, and there were
times when the intention behind the sound cues felt a touch transparent.
I could sense Zhao urging me to feel rather than allowing me to
surrender naturally. Yet even when I noticed the push, I still gave in.
By the time the final sequence arrives, the film earns every tear it
draws from you.
The ending is a marvel, not because it is surprising
but because it is inevitable. The transmutation of personal grief into
public art becomes the film’s emotional crescendo. Watching Agnes
witness an early staging of Hamlet feels like being split open by beauty
and hurt at the same time. Buckley barely speaks in the last half hour,
yet her face becomes an entire epic poem. Relief, rage, recognition,
pride, bitterness, and finally an exhausted acceptance ripple across her
features without a single word. The moment she realizes that the entire
world will mourn her son forever is almost unbearably moving. It is the
healing power of art made visible.
There will be viewers who feel
held at a distance through parts of the film. Zhao’s touch can feel
deliberate to the point of self-consciousness, especially in the first
half. Some may describe it as punishing or overly solemn. Yet the final
act pulls everything into alignment. It is here that Zhao reaches her
most confident and intuitive filmmaking, revealing the purpose behind
every quiet image, every long pause, every composition that seemed too
still to matter.
Hamnet is not a retelling of Shakespeare’s life. It
is a cinematic ritual. It is grief made into light and shadow. It is art
made from the impossible task of surviving the unimaginable. Buckley
and Mescal give two of the finest performances of this year, and Zhao
proves once again that she can find epic truths in intimate spaces. This
film broke me, but it also left me strangely uplifted, as if some
hidden part of myself had been excavated and gently returned.
Keep your heart open. This film will take care of the rest.
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