Maggie O’Farrell’s book “Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague” happened to be first published, in either an act of grace or a twisted cosmic joke, on March 31, 2020. These things can’t be planned. The novel tells an imagined story springing from a set of scant facts: The 11-year-old Hamnet Shakespeare died in 1596, and given this timing, the cause seems likely to have been the pandemic we now call the Black Plague. A few years later, Hamnet’s father’s greatest work, a play about grief, was first performed.
During this era, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were often used interchangeably. Add to all of this one more oddity: Despite living in a world haunted by the bubonic plague nearly his whole life, Shakespeare almost never addressed it directly in his work. Surely these facts, taken together, can’t be mere coincidence?
In “Hamnet,” O’Farrell tells a story of the Shakespeares and their grief. In the foreground are the lives of Agnes Shakespeare and her children, but also the work the bereaved father spun from his grief, and what this might have meant for the love between Agnes and Will. In the background is a pandemic-afflicted England, with quarantines and death and doctors in plague masks.
Now, five years and a whole world later, the novel is a film. O’Farrell wrote the screenplay with the film’s director, Chloé Zhao, who infuses it with the same blend of heartache and beauty that pulsed in previous films like “The Rider” and “Nomadland.” Those movies were understated, and “Hamnet” is too, to a degree: Zhao makes much of an object on a table, a bit of wind whipping through branches. But “Hamnet” is also ardent and searing and brimming with emotion. That amount of heat can be tough to handle without veering into sentimentality. In a few places Zhao can’t, or won’t, keep it under control.
But “Hamnet” still works most of the time, in large part because of its stars, especially the magnificent Jessie Buckley, who plays Agnes. We first meet her curled up under a tree in the forest, like some wooded creature or forest sprite, clad in a red dress. Whenever Agnes is in the forest, Zhao plays with the visual proportions of human to tree such that she seems to have slipped into some fairy tale or mythic realm. Agnes comes from a line of women who can see beyond the visible, more a creature of the pagan domain than of the rapidly modernizing, far more Christian world in the village.
She meets Will (Paul Mescal), a young Latin tutor who scribbles fervently by candlelight, and their magnetic bond rapidly turns into a family. From there the story becomes one of joy, then acute grief, then the dull gray blankness of ongoing mourning, when nothing in the world will ever seemingly be set to right. Agnes is the soul of the emotional arc, and Will is in London much of the time.
Where this all will end up is the story’s secret, but you know it will have to do with “Hamlet.” Any tale in which real life and love become the raw materials for art can slip very quickly into forehead-smacking cliché, with famous elements from the end product showing up in the character’s lives like little Easter eggs for us, the viewers in the know.
That is not “Hamnet,” and it couldn’t have been — “Hamlet,” after all, is about a dead father, not a dead son. What artists actually do is act like field mice, picking up this bit of string and that scrap of metal and configuring it all later into something entirely new, their way of processing the world by filtering it through time and experience. This is what “Hamnet” captures beautifully: Agnes’s lessons on plants, learned from her mother and repeated to her children, surface in Ophelia’s mouth. It’s handled with the kind of sensitivity that comes from artists who know how all of this works.
Buckley’s performance is ferocious and astounding, starting off strong and somehow picking up power as the movie goes along. There’s something so sonorous in her low, melodic voice that in the moment when she loses it entirely, in silent, screaming paroxysms of grief, it smacks you right in the gut. And while she’ll rightly get all of the attention as the core and heart of the film, Mescal also knocked me flat, particularly when he delivers Shakespeare’s own lines with the emotion that this version of Will would be feeling.
The parts of the film that feel beautifully full to overflowing are undercut, occasionally, by feelings of just a little too much, a shot or directorial choice that’s just a tad too precious. The most egregious example is the use of Max Richter’s song “On the Nature of Daylight” in a pivotal emotional moment. It’s a beautiful piece of music, somehow the saddest song in the world. But it’s been so overused by now (in “Arrival,” “Shutter Island” and “The Last of Us,” just to name a few of many) that the spell instantly breaks.
Curiously, what isn’t in this film adaptation is the backdrop of the plague, other than the sickness that takes young Hamnet. Arguably that would have muddied the waters in the shortened length of a feature, so it’s understandable. Perhaps nothing would have been gained by that added historical reference.
But look around, and you’ll see there’s little appetite for pandemic art these days, just as there has been in the past. Yet you can also observe all the markings of a long, gray blankness, a lot of collective wounding that never really got worked out. Like Shakespeare himself, apparently, we find some things too painful to come at head-on. Sometimes you have to approach sorrow sideways to understand it; sometimes a play like “Hamlet,” or a movie like “Hamnet,” can show you how to move through those dark woods.
Hamnet Rated PG-13 for the painful death of a child, and some mild language and sexual content. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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