Agnes Hathaway, the elusive heroine of the director Chloé Zhao’s new film, Hamnet, seems happiest when in nature: retreating to the woods as often as she can, collecting mushrooms, tucking into tree hollows to sleep. She spends so much time outdoors that rumor spreads across her English village about her mother being a witch. It’s a believable claim; Agnes, as played by the actress Jessie Buckley, is raw, brooding, and fundamentally enigmatic. The film’s first stretch relishes her mystique, which attracts a suitor better known than practically anybody in the 16th century: William Shakespeare.
When Agnes meets him, Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal) is a similarly wayward creature in Stratford-upon-Avon. He’s soon beguiled by her, unaware that she’s the woman he’ll go on to marry and have three children with. As historical fiction, Hamnet has little else to work off: Archival records reveal only the basic facts about their relationship. Shakespeare married Agnes, also known as Anne, in 1582, when he was 18 years old and she 26. They had three children, first a daughter and then boy-and-girl twins; their son, Hamnet, died in 1596 of unknown causes. The movie draws on the writer Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, a speculative work that imagines the grief Shakespeare and his wife felt after losing their son. O’Farrell’s story is based upon a theory that the play Hamlet is a reflection of that grief—a secret poured into maybe the most famous dramatic work ever written.
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Zhao’s adaptation, at its best, embraces the unknowability of this premise. An epigraph offers an observation from Shakespeare’s time—that the names Hamnet and Hamlet were considered interchangeable. From there, Hamnet embraces the poetry of that spooky coincidence. Zhao depicts Shakespeare as a moody auteur. His wife, by contrast, is a free spirit somewhat tempered by love, marriage, parenthood, and ultimately woe. Lots and lots of woe.
Hamnet is a somber watch, much more nakedly sentimental and weepy than Zhao’s other films (including the wonderful neo-Western The Rider, the Oscar-winning drama Nomadland, and the Marvel curio Eternals). Buckley shoulders intense on-screen distress without losing grasp of her character’s humanity, and Mescal lets his wan charm melt into something more haunted as Shakespeare ages and wrestles with loss. But the movie can also feel punishing, and I struggled to connect with both the primary conceit—that Hamlet is a quiet confession of personal torment by its author—and the central partnership. In its first, most romantic act, Hamnet is enchanting and fanciful; Agnes traipses through the lush forests of Warwickshire, embarking upon a sweet, awkward courtship with Shakespeare. After Agnes becomes pregnant, however, the couple’s families begrudgingly bless their union, and the newlyweds march through an endless stream of suffering to get to the story’s hammer blow of a finale.
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Much of Hamnet consists of either agonizing scenes of childbirth or far more agonizing scenes of child illness. Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), who in reality died at the age of 11, is taken by what seems to be the plague; his twin sister catches it too, although she survives. Their parents’ emotional connection, which initially powered the film, is largely set aside as they bear their children’s misery. The traumatic episode locks the characters into small, dark rooms for an extended period of time, creating a sense of relentless claustrophobia. There’s a point to that specific discomfort: Agnes, following her son’s death, comes to realize she’s been trapped in domesticity. Meanwhile, her husband flits in and out of town plying his opaque trade. Yet this is the 16th century, and the viewer knows that his trade is being William Shakespeare; the context of his legacy is hard to ignore, even though the movie doesn’t lean into it. Buckley plays Agnes’s unhappiness at being cooped up very well, and effectively conveys the extraordinary heartbreak over her son. There’s just no nuance to her misery—it seems to be mostly a signpost en route to the film’s denouement.
The ending is undeniably hard to shake. Zhao beautifully re-creates the era’s theatrical conventions when Agnes attends a performance of Hamlet. A rapt Agnes interprets the deeper meaning in her husband’s play that no one else can spot. Even in cinema, there’s nothing like watching a Shakespeare play performed engagingly onstage, and no better ruminations on mortality than the soliloquies of Hamlet itself. The score, by the pianist Max Richter, also swells with feeling; Zhao uses his best-known tune, “On the Nature of Daylight,” which has appeared in a variety of great films, including Arrival and Shutter Island. For all its powerful elements, though, Hamnet rings a bit hollow at its core. Perhaps the grand tragedies are just too overwhelming for some viewers to see beyond. I cried, yes, but in the end, I felt no closer to the mysterious bard—let alone to the people he loved, all those hundreds of years ago.
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