Working as a tutor for a farming family, William (Paul Mescal) is distracted by his students’ older sister, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), a woman with a deep connection to nature.  Courting her, the two eventually marry and have three children: Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), Judith (Olivia Lynes), and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe).  Without work, William spends long stretches of time in London, leaving Agnes to balance the home on her own.  When Hamnet passes away, filled with grief, William retreats once again to London, only this time Agnes, along with her brother, Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), follows the grieving man to the city to see what work has been so important as to pull him away from his family all these years. 

Chloé Zhao directs Hamnet for Focus Features from a script she co-wrote with Maggie O’Farrell, adapting O’Farrell’s own 2020 novel of the same name.  The 126-minute-long historical fiction premiered at the Telluride Film Festival to wide acclaim ahead of its platformed theatrical release.  Among its technical accolades, notably cinematography by  Łukasz Żal and Fiona Crombie‘s period-informed production design, both Buckley and Mescal have been widely hailed for their performances, making the title a favorite, especially among the acting circles. 

Framed and conceived as a romance, Hamnet is much more a vehicle for Buckley than a two-hander.  The film has the feel of an awards juggernaut circa the late 1990s and early aughts, complete with Emily Watson in a supporting, mothering role as even more supporting evidence, and that sense overflows into the sheer amount of work that Buckley is asked to do.  For much of the first half of the film, it plays out like the passion of Agnes, watching this woman, almost neglected by the continued absence of her husband, suffer through obstacle after obstacle to the point where it can almost become too much and turn audiences off from the film simply because it is a series of uncomfortable sequences with no end in sight.  The salve comes in when Mescal’s William returns with gifts in hand, and Zhao so carefully weaponizes his bare minimum efforts against him so that we remain fully committed to Buckley’s Agnes and sympathize with her frustrations.  This alignment with Buckley is made even easier given Mescal’s objectively poor performance through much of the early section of the film, overacting and throwing tantrums that, while they are all part of the arc of his performance, their elementary turbulence stands out and breaks the tone of the overall film.  Buckley, likewise, has moments where her performance is large and bombastic, but she is able to meter it better than her screen partner, and the real itch of her performance just comes from the script that is obsessed with putting this woman through plight after plight, and the constant misery she is asked to display eventually begins to feel rote. 

Hamnet is an actor’s film through and through, though, not only for the larger than life circumstances which lend themselves to bold, delicious performances, nor the fact that Żal’s camera is constantly looking for framework in the scene to create a proscenium arch reinforcing the adage that “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players,” but for its eventual allegiance to Shakespeare’s perhaps most beloved and revered text Hamlet.  Zhao’s script plays a little coy with the fact that Mescal’s tutor is none other than the Bard himself, laying clues growing less and less subtle for those not familiar with O’Farrell’s text culminating in another rough sequence for Mescal to stumble his way through the “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy and for those still not connecting the dots, Alwyn is saddled with a comically dramatic line reading upon Bartholomew and Agnes’ arrival in London declaring him to be none other that William Shakespeare.  This open secret creates unnecessarily obtuse writing, and being able to contend more directly with who these characters actually are earlier on would make for a more pleasant experience because, as presented, we are almost always ahead of the story after William’s first return to Stratford with the opening scene of the weird sisters in Macbeth being lovingly performed for Agnes by his children. 

While it can be a rough experience at times in the first two acts, the final thirty or so minutes spent in London are nothing short of revelatory.  The real turn comes a little earlier on with the death of young Hamnet, trading places with his twin sister, Judith, in the middle of the night so that Death would be confused and the Plague would take him instead, allowing her to live.  This personal tragedy, Zhao, and by extension, O’Farrell posit, is what spurred Shakespeare to write arguably his most famous text; an apocryphal fact that makes for moving drama even if it is often disputed by most scholars.  Whatever the truth may be, Zhao is fully committed to the truth of the film, and Hamnet reaches some incredible dramatic and emotional heights.   

Overcome with grief and perhaps guilt, William takes on the fatherly role of The Ghost, which finds Mescal caked in thick white paste and draped in a heavy, moldy cape; costuming choices by Malgosia Turzanska that really highlight the primitive nature of Elizabethan-era theatre, yet never losing the romanticized edge that allows cinema to swoon and glisten on the silver screen.  It is a highlight in the film for the actor, finally able to play into his strengths as a performer, and for much of this sequence, his scene partner is his on-stage son, Hamlet (Noah Jupe); the real-life older brother of the young titular star of the film.  The elder Jupe, like his on-stage father, is similarly made up with crudely dyed, golden curls, and with almost all of his lines lifted from the late 1500s play, he handles the language quite well, even in the heavily abridged form that it takes in the film.   

The real star of this final act, however, is, fittingly, Buckley.  She imbues Agnes with such a sense of wonder about what she is seeing play out on the stage in front of her.  It is reminiscent of yet another bit of appocraphy that the first screening of the Auguste and Louis Lumière short L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896), or “The Arrival of a Train,” caused a panic in the auditorium as audiences did not realize what they were seeing was only a facsimile.  Buckley elevates this wide-eyed wonder – a familiar sequence beloved by filmmakers, often setting their younger counterparts in front of the silver screen with a projector illuminating overhead, and overcome with awe at the medium that would shape their lives – and turns it into something else entirely.  There is the wonder of seeing a show, shaggy as it was but still immence in production design compared to anything she would have seen back on the farm with her sisters, and in the midst of it all, she processes not just her own grief at the loss of Hamnet, but she is able to recognize her husband’s grief and together, they both get to say their goodbye to their boy through Hamlet.  Zhao gets a little overzealous and lets the entire audience reach out with her towards Hamlet, and while it shows that stories can be timeless, that they can tap into our most primitive and shared feelings as a species, it lays this message on just a little too thick, but it is a small note that in no way discredits the otherwise powerful combination of tallents in this final act, and ultimatley, the film. As immense as it is, it washes over the audience effortlessly, and while many of the dramatic and emotional beats can be seen coming from a mile away, it is no different than watching a large wave roll in from the ocean, closer and closer, until it finally crashes at the shore.