Chloé Zhao‘s Hamnet arrives trailing the kind of pedigree that makes you both hopeful and wary — an Oscar and a Golden Lion for Nomadland, a detour through the Marvel machine with Eternals, and now an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s celebrated 2020 novel about the Shakespeare family and their devastating loss. Steven Spielberg produces through Amblin Entertainment, and if that conjunction of names sounds like a recipe for tasteful prestige filmmaking, well, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Yet the picture has enough peculiar textures and genuine feeling to make you forgive its more calculated qualities.
The biographical Shakespeare film has become something of a minor genre unto itself over the decades — all those inventive embroideries on a life we know tantalizingly little about. The most notorious example remains Shakespeare in Love, that confection from 1998 that somehow waltzed off with Best Picture while Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and Spielberg’s own Saving Private Ryan stood by looking bewildered (Spielberg did grab the directing prize, a consolation that must have felt like being handed a participation trophy at a party thrown in someone else’s honor). Now Spielberg finds himself on the producing end of another Shakespeare romance, and if Hamnet follows in Shakespeare in Love‘s footsteps by centering the wife rather than the bard, it does so with a markedly different sensibility — less frothy, more earthbound, though no less invested in finding the personal wellspring of great art.
Paul Mescal plays the young Will with that brooding intensity he does so well, all coiled energy and frustrated ambition, but this is really Jessie Buckley’s picture. Her Agnes is introduced sleeping in the exposed root of an ancient tree, dressed in deep red, a hawk answering her call — she’s positioned from the first frame as something almost feral, a creature of the forest whom village gossip brands a witch. Her mother, we learn, came from somewhere far away and taught her the secrets of herbs and healing before dying young. When Will first sees her, he’s smitten instantly, and the film follows their courtship, their hasty marriage engineered through a strategic pregnancy, the birth of daughter Susanna and then the twins Judith and Hamnet. The domestic years unspool in what feels like pastoral tranquility until plague arrives — those sinister doctors in their black cloaks and beaked masks — and the unthinkable happens.
Zhao stages all this with the kind of meticulous period reconstruction that looks less like historical accuracy than theatrical design. The interiors are handsome, the shelves neatly arranged with authentic-looking implements, the costumes appropriately rough-hewn yet oddly pristine. It’s the English countryside as imagined from a great distance, which is fitting given Zhao’s trajectory — she’s spent her career exploring American archetypes, the contemporary cowboy in The Rider, the van-dwelling nomads of her Oscar winner, the cosmic heroes of the Marvel universe, and now she approaches this corner of sixteenth-century England as if it were another planet entirely, populated by fascinating aliens with their ancient customs and desperate beliefs. The result can feel a bit like a museum diorama come to life, but there’s something touching about her outsider’s gaze, her genuine curiosity about these people and their world.
For most of its running time, Hamnet concerns itself less with Will’s artistic struggles than with the grinding realities of rural Elizabethan life — the precariousness of childbirth, the terror of epidemic disease, the cramped domestic sphere where women form their own alliances for survival. Emily Watson is particularly good as Will’s mother Mary, initially hostile to this strange daughter-in-law and then gradually won over; her arc represents the film’s larger interest in female solidarity as the only viable resistance to patriarchal constriction. Agnes herself stands as a liminal figure, one foot in the dying sixteenth century with its herbal remedies and mystical beliefs, the other reaching toward a modernity that will crush such knowledge underfoot. She is everything Will is not — grounded, practical, attuned to the natural world — and the film suggests that whatever genius he possesses owes something essential to her influence, her sensibility absorbed into his writing even as he abandons her for London and the theater.
The plague, when it comes, operates as more than historical backdrop. It’s the terrifying emblem of a new world that will sweep away the old certainties, against which no amount of folk wisdom can protect. Young Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe, heartbreakingly earnest) seems to exist at the threshold between epochs, a boy who speaks to death and believes he can outwit it. He cannot, of course, and the film handles his loss with a restraint that feels both respectful and slightly evasive — Zhao has a tendency to pan away from the emotional center of scenes, a mix of art-house discretion and what seems like genuine squeamishness about raw feeling.
But then comes the finale, and the picture finally earns its keep. Agnes travels to London with her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) to see what her absent husband has been doing all these years, and finds herself at the Globe Theatre for the premiere of Hamlet. Initially she’s affronted — her dead son’s name up there on the stage, her private grief made public spectacle — but as the performance unfolds, something shifts. She begins to understand what art can do with suffering, how it transmutes the unbearable into something that connects us to one another. When Agnes reaches forward to clasp the hand of the young actor playing the prince, and then other hands throughout the audience stretch toward the stage, Zhao has found an image for that mysterious transaction between performer and spectator, that exchange of energy that feels almost sacramental. Nick Cave does something similar at his concerts during “Jubilee Street,” that moment when he reaches into the crowd and the crowd reaches back, and you feel the boundary between stage and seats dissolve into something like communion.
It’s a powerful ending, almost enough to justify the more conventional stretches that precede it. Hamnet is the work of consummate professionals — Łukasz Żal’s cinematography is luminous, Max Richter’s score appropriately elegiac — and it will likely charm audiences who appreciate their period drama served with emotional intelligence and visual beauty. Whether it represents Zhao’s fullest gifts remains an open question. The picture is polished where Nomadland was raw, careful where that film was adventurous. Still, in its final moments, when art and grief and transcendence converge on that wooden stage, you glimpse something genuine struggling to break through the tasteful surface. And you remember why we go to the movies in the first place — to feel less alone in our losses, to find our private sorrows reflected and transformed in the dark.
