Hamnet review: Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley beguile and captivate in an audacious Shakespearean tragedy
Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet is not a film that sets out to solve a literary mystery. Instead, it dares to deepen one—reaching across four centuries to imagine how private grief might have shaped one of the most public works in the English language. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed 2020 novel and co-written by O’Farrell herself, Hamnet reimagines the death of William Shakespeare’s only son as the emotional crucible from which Hamlet emerged. The result is a film of rare tenderness and ambition, anchored by spellbinding performances from Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, and guided by Zhao’s quietly radical cinematic sensibility.
At its heart, Hamnet is a story about loss: the unbearable, life-altering loss of a child, and the strange ways grief reconfigures time, memory, and identity. It is also a love story—between a husband and wife, between parents and children, and between art and the pain that so often fuels it. Zhao approaches this material not as a conventional literary biopic but as something closer to a folk elegy, infused with mysticism, nature, and an almost tactile sense of emotional intimacy.
The film opens not with Shakespeare, but with Agnes Hathaway. Jessie Buckley’s Agnes is first seen wandering through a forest outside Stratford-upon-Avon, moving with a trance-like stillness that immediately sets the tone. Zhao’s camera lingers as light filters through branches, as leaves stir in the wind, as a hawk descends calmly onto Agnes’s outstretched hand. The sequence is wordless, hypnotic, and quietly declarative: this is a film that will privilege interior states over exposition, atmosphere over explanation.
Agnes is marked as different from the start. Like her late mother, she is rumored to be a witch, a woman attuned to the rhythms of the natural world in ways that unsettle her neighbors. Buckley plays her not as an eccentric curiosity, but as someone deeply present—alert to subtle shifts in energy, emotion, and environment. Every glance, every half-smile carries weight. It is an unshowy yet deeply expressive performance, one that anchors the entire film.
Paul Mescal’s William Shakespeare enters as a young man brimming with intelligence, frustration, and ambition. He is restless in Stratford, trapped in the gloving business of his abusive father and yearning for something larger, more meaningful. Mescal avoids the trap of portraying Shakespeare as a grand, preternaturally gifted genius. Instead, his William is raw, uncertain, and deeply human—a man who feels things intensely but does not yet know how to shape them.
Their meeting feels inevitable rather than dramatic. Agnes recognizes something in William before he recognizes it in himself, and their connection unfolds with a quiet inevitability that feels both romantic and grounded. Zhao resists melodrama here, allowing the relationship to develop through glances, shared silences, and an intuitive understanding that feels almost pre-linguistic. When they marry—against the unease of William’s mother Mary, played with stern restraint by Emily Watson—the union feels less like a social contract than a mutual act of recognition.
The early sections of Hamnet move deliberately, even languorously. Zhao’s pacing has often divided audiences, but here it feels essential. The film takes its time establishing the texture of daily life: childbirth, domestic labor, village rituals, the slow passage of seasons. Agnes gives birth to her first child, Susanna, in the forest—a moment framed as both primal and transcendent. When she later gives birth indoors to the twins Judith and Hamnet, the shift feels ominous, a subtle disruption of the natural order.
William’s departure for London marks the film’s emotional fault line. His decision to pursue a life in the theatre is not framed as selfishness, but as necessity—an almost compulsive need to follow the calling that defines him. Yet Zhao is careful to show the cost of this ambition. Agnes remains behind, tethered to home and children, while William becomes increasingly absent, physically and emotionally.
When illness strikes Stratford, the film does not sensationalize it. There are no dramatic musical cues or overt foreshadowing. Instead, Zhao allows dread to seep in gradually, through small disruptions and anxious glances. Hamnet’s death at the age of 11 is devastating precisely because of its restraint. The moment arrives quietly, almost anti-climactically, and yet its impact is seismic.
The film’s treatment of grief is its greatest achievement. Rather than depicting mourning as a single emotional arc, Hamnet presents it as something fragmented, cyclical, and deeply isolating. Agnes’s grief is elemental—she wanders the forest again, not in rapture this time, but in stunned disbelief. Buckley conveys devastation not through tears or grand gestures, but through stillness. It is as if Agnes’s entire being has been hollowed out, leaving only echoes.
William’s grief, by contrast, is displaced. Away in London, he throws himself into his work, becoming increasingly successful even as his inner life collapses. Zhao and O’Farrell suggest that Shakespeare’s response to loss is not expression, but transformation: the alchemy of pain into language, structure, and drama. The film posits a haunting inversion—that Hamlet is not about a son haunted by his father’s ghost, but a father haunted by the loss of his son.
This is where Hamnet becomes most audacious. The film draws a speculative line between personal tragedy and artistic creation, suggesting that the themes of Hamlet—indecision, despair, existential futility—are the displaced expressions of Shakespeare’s private agony. In Zhao’s vision, Shakespeare himself becomes the ghost: a restless, hollowed-out figure wandering the world, condemned to live while his child does not.
Critics may reasonably object to this premise. It relies heavily on the near-identical names Hamnet and Hamlet, a linguistic coincidence that scholars have long debated. Treating Shakespeare as a modern psychological subject risks anachronism, projecting contemporary ideas about grief and self-expression onto a 16th-century figure. As the film implicitly acknowledges, the same argument could be made about any number of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Yet Hamnet succeeds not because it proves anything, but because it imagines something with extraordinary empathy and conviction. Zhao and O’Farrell are not offering a thesis so much as a myth—a story that feels emotionally true, even if it cannot be historically verified. Like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Hamnet does not replace the original text; it refracts it, offering a new way of seeing.
Visually, the film is ravishing. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal captures the English countryside with a clarity that borders on the sacred. The natural world is not mere backdrop here, but an active presence—responsive, symbolic, and emotionally charged. Trees, water, light, and shadow all seem to participate in the characters’ inner lives.
Max Richter’s score envelops the film without overwhelming it. His music pulses softly beneath the images, rising and receding like breath. It underscores the film’s emotional currents while leaving space for silence, which Zhao uses to devastating effect.
The supporting cast further enriches the film. Emily Watson’s Mary Shakespeare embodies a different mode of maternal grief—one shaped by repression and propriety. The children, particularly the twins, are portrayed with an unaffected naturalism that makes Hamnet’s absence all the more painful.
What ultimately distinguishes Hamnet is its refusal to instrumentalize grief. The film does not suggest that loss is somehow “worth it” because it produced great art. Instead, it presents creation as a survival mechanism—an imperfect, incomplete response to something that can never be fully understood or healed. Shakespeare’s plays do not redeem his suffering; they merely give it shape.
In its final movement, Hamnet circles back to the idea of naming—of how words both reveal and obscure. There is, of course, that famous line in Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name?” Zhao and O’Farrell’s answer is quietly devastating. Names carry echoes. They blur. They transform. They become vessels for memory and meaning, long after the people they belonged to are gone.
As a piece of cinema, Hamnet is deeply moving, formally confident, and emotionally fearless. It will not appeal to everyone; its pacing is patient, its approach impressionistic, its central conceit deliberately speculative. But for those willing to meet it on its own terms, it offers a profound meditation on love, loss, and the mysterious processes by which human suffering is transmuted into art.
Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley are extraordinary together, grounding Zhao’s lyrical vision in performances of rare sensitivity and intelligence. Their Agnes and William are not icons or legends, but parents—broken, yearning, and achingly real.
This Hamnet review ultimately returns to the idea that some stories are not meant to be resolved, only revisited. Zhao’s film does not close the book on Shakespeare; it opens a new, tender chapter alongside it. In doing so, it reminds us that behind every great work of art lies a human story—often unfinished, often unknowable, but always worth imagining.
Hamnet is out now in the US, on 9 January in the UK, and on 15 January in Australia.