by Albert Pears
A woman stands in a field and calls a hawk down from the sky. Chloé Zhao holds on this image—the gloved hand, the circling bird, the vast emptiness of the Warwickshire countryside—long enough that it stops being picturesque and becomes something else: a statement of method. This is Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), and in Hamnet, Zhao films her with the same patient attentiveness she brought to Frances McDormand’s wandering Fern in Nomadland, as a figure who moves through the world with a different kind of knowledge than the people around her possess. The film announces immediately that it will be more interested in watching this woman summon birds than in delivering the origin story of literary genius.
Zhao has always been drawn to landscapes as emotional territories—the South Dakota Badlands in The Rider, the American West in Nomadland, the cosmic vistas of Eternals—and in Hamnet she transforms the English countryside into a realm where the natural and supernatural coexist without friction. The romance between Agnes and the young William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) unfolds through a series of encounters that feel both mythic and intensely physical. When they first kiss in her barn, Zhao holds on their faces with an almost unbearable intimacy, letting us see the transformation that occurs when two people recognize something essential in each other. But the film’s most striking conceit is Agnes’s gift—or curse—of being able to read a person’s fate by holding the space between their thumb and palm. When she touches Shakespeare, she sees greatness, but she also sees herself dying with two children. The prophecy hangs over their courtship like a sentence already written.
Buckley, who has been giving fearless performances for years now in films like Wild Rose and I’m Thinking of Ending Things, brings to Agnes a quality that’s hard to define—a wildness tempered by profound intelligence, a woman who understands herbs and healing, storytelling and falconry, but who exists slightly outside the social world’s conventions. Watch her face when Shakespeare recounts the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice; she’s not just listening to a story but absorbing it into her being, understanding it as a pattern that will recur. When she later gives birth to Susanna alone in the forest, Zhao films it not as a medical event but as a return to something primal, Agnes crouching among trees with the same self-possession she brings to everything.
Mescal’s Shakespeare is, necessarily, an invention—we have so few facts about the man’s inner life that any portrayal becomes a kind of creative speculation. Mescal, whose breakout role in Normal People revealed an actor capable of expressing desire and vulnerability with equal intensity, plays him as a young man caught between conflicting drives: the domestic pull of family, the manual labor his father demands, and the inexplicable need to put words on paper. The film wisely avoids the trap of depicting Shakespeare as a fully formed genius. Instead, we see him frustrated, stuck, unable to find the form for what he wants to say. It’s Agnes who releases him, sending him to London not because she doesn’t need him but because she understands that some people can only become themselves by leaving.
The film’s midsection, covering the years of Shakespeare’s absence and the twins’ childhood, has a patient, observational quality. Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal (who shot Ida and Cold War) film the children’s games and routines with an attention to light and season that recalls Terrence Malick, but without Malick’s sometimes cloying symbolism. When Agnes’s hawk dies and they bury it in the forest, she tells the children that the bird carried their wishes in its heart, and they can still see its spirit in the air. It’s a moment that could tip into sentimentality, but Buckley plays it with such matter-of-fact conviction that it becomes instead a lesson in how stories help us metabolize loss.
Then the plague comes. Judith falls ill, and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe, remarkable in his brief screen time) lies beside his sister, willing to trade his life for hers. Zhao films the children’s room with the intimacy of a deathbed vigil, the camera moving slowly around their bodies as if trying to memorize them. When Hamnet begins to call for his mother—seeing himself, in his fever dreams, on a stage behind a scrim—the film achieves a moment of devastating beauty. Agnes arrives too late. The sequence is almost unbearable in its restraint; Zhao refuses to dramatize the moment of death, giving us instead the aftermath: Hamnet in repose, Shakespeare returning home expecting to mourn Judith and finding his son gone instead.
What follows is the film’s most difficult and most rewarding section. Agnes’s grief curdles into rage at Shakespeare’s departure, at his ability to return to work, to London, to a life that continues. When she holds his hand now, she tells him, she sees nothing—the gift that brought them together has been severed by loss. Buckley’s performance in these scenes is extraordinary; she doesn’t play grief as a single emotion but as a weather system that changes from scene to scene, sometimes numb, sometimes incandescent with fury, always precise.
Mescal, meanwhile, shows us Shakespeare trying to work through his own grief by transforming it into art. The rehearsals for Hamlet are filmed with documentary-like directness—we see him pushing his actors for more passion, more reality, unable to articulate what he needs because what he needs is to resurrect his son. The moment when Shakespeare stands on a bridge over the Thames, contemplating suicide, and begins instead to recite “To be, or not to be,” could easily feel like biographical kitsch. But Mescal plays it not as the birth of a famous soliloquy but as a man using language to talk himself back from the edge, the words a kind of rope thrown to himself.
The film’s climax—Agnes traveling to London with her brother and attending the first performance of Hamlet at the Globe—is where Zhao’s approach either justifies itself or doesn’t, depending on your tolerance for a certain kind of cinematic transcendence. Agnes initially recoils, thinking her son’s name is being profaned for entertainment. But as the play unfolds, as she sees Shakespeare performing the Ghost, she begins to understand that this is how he grieves, how he keeps their son alive. The film intercuts between the play and Agnes’s face, and Buckley lets us watch her moving through anger and resistance toward something like acceptance, maybe even grace.
In the final scene, as Hamlet dies on stage, Agnes reaches forward and the audience mirrors her gesture, all these hands extending toward the dying prince. She envisions Hamnet on the stage, smiling, walking backstage and disappearing through a hole that echoes the mysterious cave in her forest. Agnes laughs—the first time since his death—and the film ends not on grief but on this moment of transformation, where a dead child becomes art, becomes immortal, becomes available to strangers centuries later.
Hamnet will frustrate viewers looking for traditional narrative momentum or psychological realism. Zhao’s pacing is deliberate, almost liturgical, and the film’s reliance on visual metaphor and spiritual suggestion won’t satisfy everyone. But there’s something audacious about a film that treats the creation of Hamlet not as a literary event but as an act of parental devotion, that suggests Shakespeare’s greatest achievement wasn’t inventing the modern psychological drama but finding a way to keep his son’s name alive. The film argues, implicitly, that all art is a form of resurrection, an attempt to hold onto what we’ve lost by transforming it into something that can be shared.
Zhao has made a film about grief that refuses to explain grief, that presents it instead as a force that breaks some people and transforms others, that can coexist with rage and love and even, eventually, something like joy. Whether this approach fully succeeds is almost beside the point; the ambition alone—to make a film about Shakespeare that cares more about his dead son than his living plays—deserves attention. In a year crowded with biopics that reduce their subjects to inspirational narratives, Hamnet offers something rarer: a meditation on what it costs to make art from loss, and whether that transformation can ever truly heal the wound it transforms.
