Hamnet is a geography of sorrow and a triumph of cinema

Rating: ★★★★★

Written by Denise Breen

In the canon of literary adaptations, the translation of Maggie O’Farrell’s luminous 2020 novel, Hamnet, to the screen was always going to be a perilous undertaking. Having read the book, I wodered how a director might adapt a story that is so internal—so reliant on the sensory experiences of smell, touch, and the unseen currents between people. It would require a cinematic language that speaks in whispers rather than shouts. It is with profound relief and awe, therefore, that one emerges from Chloé Zhao’s film adaptation witnessing not just a faithful retelling, but a transmutation of the source material into a visual poem of staggering emotional weight. This is a masterpiece of grief and a love letter to the unseen women of history.

At its core, Hamnet acts as a corrective to the Great Man theory of history. While it concerns the family of William Shakespeare, the playwright himself remains nameless for much of the runtime, referred to simply as the Latin Tutor, the husband, or the father. The centre of gravity here is Agnes (a character historically known as Anne Hathaway), the wild, herbalist wife left behind in Stratford-upon-Avon while her husband conquers the London stage. But the narrative engine is the singular, devastating event that defines their lives: the sudden death of their eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, from the bubonic plague in 1596.

Chloé Zhao, whose previous work included Nomadland, has demonstrated a singular ability to capture the spiritual connection between humans and their landscapes. Zhao is the perfect steward for this story. She grounds the film in the mud, the apples, and the drying herbs of the Warwickshire countryside. We do not just see the 16th century; we feel the damp wool, smell the rosemary, and hear the omnipresent buzzing of bees. It is a tactile, sensory experience that establishes the fragility of life long before death arrives.

However, the film’s atmospheric beauty would be mere set dressing without the performance at its centre. Jesse Buckley, portraying Agnes, delivers what must be considered the defining performance of her career thus far. Buckley has always possessed a screen presence that feels elemental—a mixture of iron and air—but here, she transcends acting to inhabit a state of being.

Agnes is a woman misunderstood by her time; she is attuned to the natural world, possessing a "gift" of foresight and healing that borders on the mystical. Buckley portrays this not with witchy affectation, but with a fierce, grounded intelligence. She is a hawk in human form. In the first half of the film, her courtship with the Latin Tutor is played with a knowing, sensual confidence. But it is in the film’s second half, following the death of her son, that Buckley shatters the viewer.

Cinematic portrayals of grief often fall into melodrama, but Buckley’s work is excruciatingly internal. We watch her wash a small body with a tenderness that hurts to look at; we see her navigate a world that has suddenly lost its colour. There is a sequence, shortly after the funeral, where Agnes wanders the edges of the forest, and Buckley conveys a sorrow so ancient and so heavy that it feels as though she is physically dragging the scenery behind her. It is a performance of profound humanity, stripping away the centuries to show that the agony of a mother losing a child is the same in 1596 as it is today.

Opposite her, Paul Mescal takes on the daunting task of playing the greatest writer in the English language. It is a performance that requires a fascinating, and risky, calibration—one that pays off with devastating dividends in the final act.

It must be noted that in the opening hour of the film, Mescal’s performance initially appears detached, perhaps even wooden. He plays the young tutor as a man entirely ill-at-ease in his own skin, and certainly ill-at-ease in the domestic sphere of his abusive father’s house. There is a stiffness to his posture and a remoteness in his eyes that some might mistake for a lack of chemistry or engagement. However, as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that this is a brilliant, deliberate character choice.

Mescal is portraying a man living entirely within his own head—a genius suffocating in the mundane. He is opaque because he is absent, his mind already drifting toward the stages of London even while his body remains in Stratford. This woodenness serves to highlight the vitality of Buckley’s Agnes; he is the ink, she is the blood. He is a man who does not know how to be a human being in the real world, only on the page.

However, the trajectory of Mescal’s performance is one of a slow, painful unravelling. When the news of Hamnet’s death reaches him in London, that deliberate stiffness cracks. The transformation is physical. Mescal seems to shrink, the armour of his intellect failing to protect him from the visceral reality of loss. The "wooden" man is carved hollow by grief.

The scenes where he returns to Stratford are masterclasses in repressed emotion colliding with unbearable pain. He cannot meet Buckley’s eyes, not because he doesn't love her, but because he feels he has failed her. The climax of his arc—the writing and production of Hamlet—is handled with immense sensitivity. We see him pouring his ghost, his son, into the text. Mescal captures the manic, desperate energy of a man trying to resurrect the dead through art. By the time he delivers the soliloquies on stage, channeling his own grief through the mouth of the Ghost, the woodenness is gone, replaced by a raw, trembling vulnerability that is difficult to watch but impossible to ignore. He becomes fully human, finally matching Buckley’s emotional intensity.

The chemistry between the two leads, therefore, is not a traditional romantic spark, but a complex orbit of two grieving entities trying to find a shared language. The script, adapted with restraint, allows the silence between them to speak volumes. The dialogue is sparse, often deferring to the visual storytelling.

The film’s exploration of grief is uncommonly patient. It does not rush the process. It understands that grief is not a linear line but a haunting. The ghost of Hamnet is not a spectral special effect, but a presence felt in the empty spaces of the frame—a sudden draft, a missing plate at the table. Zhao uses the camera to suggest the boy’s perspective, lingering on the siblings he left behind, specifically his twin, Judith. The bond between the twins is depicted with a heartbreaking purity, making the severance of that bond feel like a physical amputation.

Technically, the film is flawless. The cinematography relies on natural light, moving from the golden, honeyed hues of the courtship to the slate-greys and deep blues of the plague winter. The score is minimal, often utilizing period instrumentation that blends into the ambient sounds of nature—the wind in the trees, the scratching of a quill, the crackling of a fire.

If I had a criticism, its that some may find the pacing in the second act punishing. The film refuses to offer easy catharsis. It sits in the sorrow, forcing the audience to endure the weight of the empty house alongside Agnes. Yet, this endurance is necessary. It earns the emotional release of the finale.

The final sequence, where Agnes travels to London to see the play that bears her son’s name, is a sequence of pure cinematic transcendence. As she watches her husband on stage, performing the ghost of the father to the son (a reversal of their reality), the film coalesces into a profound statement on the purpose of art. It suggests that art is not just a reflection of life, but a vessel for the things we cannot survive otherwise. The look exchanged between Buckley and Mescal across the crowded theatre is a moment of forgiveness and understanding that lands with the force of a tidal wave.

Hamnet is not merely a period drama about the plague or a biopic of Shakespeare. It is a timeless exploration of the fragility of existence. It asks how we survive the worst thing imaginable, and how we forgive those we love for grieving differently than we do.

Jesse Buckley has cemented her status as one of the finest actors of her generation, offering a performance of fierce, protective, and devastating maternal love. Paul Mescal, by daring to start from a place of detachment, creates a character arc that is deeply moving, showing us the birth of a soul through the fire of loss.

In an era of cinema often dominated by spectacle and noise, Hamnet dares to be quiet, intimate, and devastatingly human. It is a film that acknowledges that while we all must die, the love we leave behind—and the art we create from that love—is the only immortality we are granted. It is a cinematic triumph.