Hamnet

A young William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) fall in love and start a family until a personal tragedy drives them apart, compelling Shakespeare to pen his masterpiece Hamlet. Chloe Zhao directs and edits this adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s historical fiction novel.

A profound, non-manipulative exploration of grief. Losing a child in childbirth is tough. And so is losing another one unpredictably to the Plague. For Agnes Hathaway, the pain is all the more to bear when her artistic husband sets off to London, channelling his grief into his writing, relying on a ‘prince of Denmark’ to fill in for their late eleven-year-old son Hamnet. Safe to say, grief and its aftermath constitute much of Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, although not in the Oscar-baiting fashion you would expect otherwise. No strangers to playing tragic and morally broken characters, Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley explore the emotional weight with extreme nuance. Buckley, especially, is a class act here, balancing maternal rage with muted silences. But Zhao’s film isn’t all tears; the first half plays out more like one woman’s cathartic exploration of the world around her, much like her Oscar-winning Americana drama Nomadland. Buckley’s Agnes is introduced as a mystic healer who chases hawks in the wild or indulges in grounded meet-cute moments with a certain moustachioed tutor named Will. Eager not to go full Shakespearean drama mode, she sidelines melodrama for a more Zhao-ian level of sombreness. And that’s how the film enchantingly draws you in before the floodgates open and a subversive Shakespearean finale reunites our distant but loving protagonists.

A Shakespearean drama, but not in the average sense. While Buckley gets to engage with the rawer emotion of the film, Mescal brings his quintessential dove-eyed tenderness to Shakespeare as you’ve never thought of him before. Maggie O’Farrell’s source material relegates him to a side character, but in her script with Zhao, she provides the grieving father with a lot more screentime. And with an actor like Mescal at their disposal, this creative choice proves to be a rewarding bet. Considering how Shakespeare is much more well-known and well-discussed than his wife, a few trite moments can’t be avoided (one particular scene with Mescal muttering ‘to be or not to be’ might yield a mixed flavour). But on the whole, the Bard is thankfully not glamorised as an emotionless genius bashful about the impact his words would have for centuries to come. Rather, Mescal’s Will is a mere mortal with human fears. He might put on a smile and ask his young son Hamnet to be brave and take care of his mother as he himself sets off to stage fancy period plays at the Globe theatre (meticulously recreated as an intimate replica set). Underneath his attempts to be a good husband and a good family man, this Shakespeare is a man who thought he could solve all his worries with just his words. Immortalising your dead son in a violent play with Oedipal subtext might not be the ideal method of coping with grief; it’s not the ideal coping strategy. But when a poet is unable to provide enough love to his overworked wife in a dark age, maybe the only way he can proclaim his love and his humanity is through his God-given talents of weaving words together. In the hands of another director favouring epic drama over human emotions, Hamnet could have been hijacked with biopic-style ‘art above all’ cringe. The epic proportions can still be felt, courtesy of Max Richter’s orchestral score and Fiona Crombie and Alice Felton’s production design for the stage sequences. But with a master storyteller like Zhao at the helm, we are blessed with a Shakespearean drama that remains universally relatable and moving.