Hamnet ★★★1/2
- 2filmcritics
- 47 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Availability: Beginning Thanksgiving Day in the US (November 26), showing in limited release in theaters; wider release targeted for December 12. No online purchase or rental at this time. As a Focus Features production, release is expected on Peacock in 4 months, and on Prime Video 4 months after that, or about July 2026. See JustWatch here for up-to-date online availability.
Hollywood on Avon
When Will Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Agnes (Jessie Buckley) first meet—their romance is brief and sweet and swiftly consummated—Agnes asks him to tell her a story “that moves you.” Agnes is Gaia-like, most comfortable in the woods that surround Stratford, a hawk-whisperer, and a believer in the magical, the supernatural (to those in the town, she’s the daughter of a witch-woman). Her request is an early sign that she needs the cerebral Will, the glovemaker-cum-playwright who would rather be in the city, to tap his emotional core, even to have and display his own magic. He will.
Agnes needs the cerebral Will to tap his emotional core.
Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” is intense, provocative, and dark. A tragedy. Will’s mother, Mary (a too-recognizable Emily Watson) abides her son’s marriage, but only just, and she carries a posture of fatalism, the result of a pox that took 3 of her children. Will is forced to work off the debts of his neer-do-well father, who emotionally and physically abuses him, and his efforts to put quill to paper in Stratford prove tortured and fruitless. In the small community of Stratford, Agnes (with her magic) and Will (as a reader and writer and teacher of Latin) are outsiders. One of Will’s few pleasures is teaching his son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) the art of stage-like sword-fighting, foreshadowing the play to come.
Chloé Zhao’s film opens with Agnes (Jessie Buckley) at home in the forest,
next to a seemingly bottomless cavity that can mean the womb or death.
When 11-year-old Hamnet dies an excruciating death from the pox in the summer of 1596, with Will still on the road home from London, the family is torn apart. For Agnes, the deep grief she feels is unrequited in Will, who perhaps too soon announces he needs to be in London with his theater company. More than once (indeed, too often) she accuses Will of not being present when their son died. For Agnes, death was not an absolute; the hawk she befriended and trained left an image in the sky that could be seen and felt after his death; Hamnet had died yet was in reach, for a while at least. And, as Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt has argued, both Will and Agnes likely felt that what remained of Catholic ceremonial practices involving the dead—for Hamnet, only a brief, simple service at his burial—was entirely inadequate, emotionally insufficient.
Paul Mescal is a surprisingly
effective Will Shakespeare.
Fast forward 4 years. Will has been working on, and rehearsing, a play called “Hamlet” (we’re informed at the beginning of the film that Hamnet and Hamlet are interchangeable names), to be performed at the Globe Theatre in Southwark. Agnes is there, albeit reluctantly, drawn by the play’s title and encouraged by her brother (Joe Alwyn Bartholome), an ordinary guy who shares a bit of her ruralness, and as a character exists somewhere between Will and Agnes. When she wants to leave he offers the counsel that serves as the movie’s tagline: “keep your heart open.”
We’re in the hands of Hollywood. Revelation. Epiphany. The touch. When they first met, Agnes had told her brother, “he has more inside him than any man I know,” and now Will has written “Hamlet,” displayed his magic qualities, to prove it. Make the couple (a second time!). Fade out.
Buckley is fetchingly pretty in the early scenes, weary and lined (but still pretty) in later ones, an emotional force throughout. The camera loves her face—too much, we think, especially, though perhaps inevitably, in the film’s emotional climax. Mescal is a surprisingly effective Shakespeare, emoting thoughtfulness and anguish, his pasty white (closeted intellectual) skin contrasting with Agnes’s somewhat ruddy, freckled complexion. They’re great together, though it’s Buckley’s movie, because only Agnes can ratify Will’s emotional turn.
Childbirth scenes are frequent and excruciating. Agnes's (Buckley, left) premonition that on her deathbed she will have 2 children is challenged by her having twins, Hamnet and Judith, after having had her and Will's oldest child, Susanna.
Zhao, who won 2 Oscars for ”Nomadland” in 2020, co-wrote the script with Maggie O’Farrell, author of the eponymous book on which it is based. Though a compelling tale on screen, one might quibble with some of the editing that produces belabored scenes. Zhao clearly got as much as one possibly could out of not only a child actor (Jupe was 11 during filming), but 2 of the best actors practicing today: Buckley and Mescal.
At the Globe, Agnes (Buckley) reaches out to touch the hand of Hamlet. Her brother (Joe Alwyn Bartholome), behind her at right, has enough understanding of the couple to encourage her to stay to see the play continue. That touch will be replicated
by the crowd, a sign of Will's emotive power.
Some will find the denouement at the Globe overly therapeutic and more than a trifle theatrical. The parting of the crowd. The brother’s advice. The turn of Agnes’s head—back left, back right, as she surveys the audience and understands that Will’s production has profoundly moved not only her but all those present. Everything but applause.
Keep your heart open. Hollywood will fill it.
He says: City mouse, country mouse.
She says: Oscar-nominated in 2022 for their acting, Buckley (“The Lost Daughter”) and Mescal (“Aftersun”) display a range of emotions one rarely sees.
Date: 2025
Director: Chloé Zhao
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Jacobi Jupe, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn Bartholome
Country: United Kingdom, United States
Language: English
Runtime: 125 minutes
Other Awards: 12 wins (including the Toronto International Film Festival People’s Choice Award) and 8 other nominations
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