Review: ‘Hamnet’ is a heartbreaking testament to the power of art
2025 / Dir. Chloé Zhao
☆ 4/5
Watch if you like: crying in public.
After Chloé Zhao’s historic wins for Best Director and Best Picture for Nomadland, she fell into a common post-Oscar pitfall: making a bland big-budget movie. Her MCU entry The Eternals has all but been forgotten at this point, but thankfully it wasn’t a career killer. Zhao’s new tearjerker, Hamnet, finds a compelling middle ground between her heartfelt, naturalistic independent pictures and mainstream historical drama.
Based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, who co-wrote the screenplay with Zhao, Hamnet fictionalizes a period in which Agnes and William Shakespeare lost their son, Hamnet, leading up to the production of his great tragedy, Hamlet. The film makes the wise choice of starting with William (Paul Mescal) and Agnes’s (Jessie Buckley) meet-cute moment, where he’s a lowly Latin tutor forced to pay off his abusive father’s debts, and she is a well-born daughter with a witchy origin story who’s more interested in wandering the woods with her hawk than finding a husband. So little is known of Shakespeare’s actual personality that invention is necessary for any adaptation, and here he is, fortunately, not some great in the making, but rather a man often tongue-tied and unsure how to get out the jumbled thoughts in his head.
We’ve been in an aromantic period in mainstream movies, and it feels refreshing to see a film give so much time and attention to establishing their bond and who they are as a couple, well before they have children. When we fast-forward to when they have three children, we care about these people, which makes it even more heartbreaking to know that young Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe in a brief but impactful performance) won’t be around long, bringing real pain rather than emotional manipulation. That brings the central conflict in how the two parents manage his loss, as well as one of the core themes of the healing power of art.
With Mr. Shakespeare often in London trying to make this whole playwriting thing happen, the majority of the film’s focus is on Agnes, and Jessie Buckley delivers a show-stopping performance that is sure to get a lot of attention during awards season. She puts her body and soul into the pain of childbearing and loss experienced on screen. The big, full-body expression of grief she delivers may seem over-the-top, but it works because of the movie’s restraint and relative naturalism.
Cinematographer Łukasz Żal (I’m Thinking of Ending Things, The Zone of Interest) helps Zhao bring to life the beauty of the woods Agnes often wanders in, including an ominous black cave where she was birthed. Continuing to highlight natural beauty and ground her films in it, as she did in movies like The Rider and Nomadland, helps bring moments of stillness between the scenes of raw emotion and helps avoid becoming overly melodramatic.
As the film edges closer to the premiere of Hamlet, the script also avoids many hacky historical-fiction traps, such as overexplaining connections between the play and Shakespeare’s actual life. Most of the connections, apart from a scene where a despairing Mescal invents “To be or not to be…”, are tangential or impressionistic. In a clever bit of meta-casting, Jacobi Jupe’s brother Noah plays the actor portraying Hamlet (and thankfully redeems himself from his appearance in The Carpenter’s Son).
Max Richter provides a beautiful score for Hamnet, but recycles his often-used song “On the Nature of Daylight” for the emotionally charged closer. Using a track that’s too often thrown in TV shows these days to artificially generate tears is unnecessary for all the careful work that’s led to the final section. If you’re like me, you’ll already be tearing up at this point, and you won’t be thinking about this and other unnecessarily heavy-handed choices made.
Yes, Hamnet may lay it on a little too thick, but it presents a refreshing take on the historic drama and an antidote to many contemporary Hollywood films by thoughtfully creating a lived-in exploration of a relationship’s highs and lows. Its case for the necessity of art in our lives is a powerful one during a time when arts funding continues to be cut and endangered, and the film, while heartbreaking, is a true testament to how engaging with art can help us confront life and loss.