Or, Shakespeare in Grief. The death of the bard’s young son shapes one of his greatest works in Hamnet, which opens in Prague cinemas this weekend after scoring eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Director (Chloé Zhao), and Best Actress (Jessie Buckley). The literary basis and heavy themes may be enough to turn off general audiences, but Zhao’s tender treatment and Buckley’s stunning lead performance turns this into an unforgettable experience. The climactic rendition of Hamlet here is one of cinema’s all-time great sequences, and will leave most viewers in tears.
But until then, Hamnet may not win you over. Despite the lush cinematography from Łukasz Żal (The Zone of Interest) across rural locations in Herefordshire, first-rate production and costume design that transports you to late 16th-century England, and greatly appealing performances from Buckley and Paul Mescal, the leisurely-paced narrative keeps viewers at arm’s length over the first half of the film, and the central trauma that hangs over the film is almost too grim to take.
But Zhao’s film is unconcerned with crafting a traditionally compelling story, and instead works on the level of a horror film prodding the eternal abyss. In a kind of cross between The Witch and The Tree of Life, the filmmaker is interested in exploring the disquieting unknowns of human existence, of life and death, the question of being or not being. And the film so authentically recreates its underlying, unspoken anguish that we often feel a sense of unease at watching something we perhaps shouldn’t be watching.
Every viewer walking into Hamnet knows what the film is about, but like the source novel by Maggie O’Farrell, and like a zombie movie that never mentions the term zombie, the film never says the name Shakespeare, or even William. Mescal’s character is referred to variously as the tutor or the husband, and Buckley is Agnes, not Anne Hathaway. The unusual choice allows viewers to fully live in the environment of the film without the distraction that an external reference could conjure.
At the outset, Mescal’s tutor is teaching Agnes’ stepbrothers Latin to repay his father’s debts, and he almost immediately lusts after the older sister while happening across her in the fields. His mother Mary (Emily Watson) later mentions Agnes’ reputation as something of a witch—a woman of the wild—but the seed has been planted, and soon enough Agnes is pregnant.
While everyone around them seems to disapprove of the pair’s union, including Agnes’ stern stepmother (Louisa Harland), her kind brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) and the tutor’s meek father (David Wilmot) come to an agreement. They are married, and over the next 15 years will raise three children, older sister Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and twins Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes), while the husband finds himself traveling to London to work behind the scenes on stage productions.
There’s a quiet spirituality to these early scenes that cover the first half of the movie, as the family embraces life with a certain curiosity and wonder. In one memorable moment, Agnes buries her beloved pet hawk, but tells her children of its passage to the spirit world with such joy and conviction that they—and we—genuinely believe she is watching its soul soar above them.
This contrasts with the climactic trauma that will hang over the second half of Hamnet. We so frequently see scenes of death and dying in movies that we can become numb to their impact, but Zhao is unrelenting in her presentation here, and extended scenes of sickness and their aftermath become difficult to endure. The director so carefully observes the relationships to Hamnet, from mother, father, and twin sister, that the loss resonates in greater terms; the unflinching presentation recalls Todd Field’s In the Bedroom in emotional gravity.
Mescal’s Shakespeare figure is absent during these scenes, something that Buckley’s Agnes will come to resent; he will become increasingly absent from the family’s lives as his work progresses in London and he processes the grief on his own. That will eventually manifest in the play Hamlet, which Agnes will come to see in the film’s extended climax.
Hamnet ends with an extended rendition of key scenes of Hamlet, largely experienced through Agnes’ slow realization of the manifestation of her husband’s profound, unsaid grief. It’s a total knockout of a sequence on multiple levels, in thematic, literary, and emotional terms, and an instant classic sequence that elevates the entire film as well as its two central performances. Never has reading an actor’s face been more compelling than watching Buckley in these final scenes.
Beyond that, there’s one of those great cinematic strokes of luck here in having Noah Jupe, older brother of the young actor who plays Hamnet, appear in the sequence as Hamlet on stage. The elder Jupe not only manifests his brother on the stage, but knocks the soliloquies out of the park. And it’s so rare to see genuinely compassionate characters onscreen that it’s a joy watching Alwyn’s quiet performance as Bartholomew, who is supportive of his sister throughout the entire movie, and standing right behind her in its most crucial scene.
Hamnet is not an easy film. Zhao’s refusal to soften its grief or dramatize it in conventional terms may test some viewers’ patience, but the cumulative effect is devastating in the best sense. Anchored by a revelatory (and soon to be Oscar-winning) performance from Buckley and an audacious final act that recontextualizes one of the most famous works in English literature, the film finds profound emotional truth in restraint, absence, and loss. It is a quiet, unsparing meditation on grief—and one that lingers long after the final curtain falls.
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Incredible film