Alex Wheeler Movie Ops

After a detour into the wide world of Marvel, writer/director Chloé Zhao shrinks back down with Hamnet. The move is long-awaited as Eternals dominated her time right after her acclaim peaked. She had built a strong reputation with her first two indie films, then a pairing with the inimitable Frances McDormand propelled Nomadland to Oscar glory. But her attempt at box office glory with Eternals proved a poor outing, with the huge stakes of Marvel not mixing evenly with Zhao’s intimate eye. Then she turned to Hamnet, an adaptation of the novel of the same name, which promised to be more like her previous work.

If you’re tripped up by how similar that title is to Shakespeare’s legendary play Hamlet, then you’ve keyed into the right thing. As the film notes, Hamlet and Hamnet were considered the same name in 16th-century England, and the story is, in fact, about the creation of Shakespeare’s play. Turns out, to understand the story one must go far back in Shakespeare’s (played by Paul Mescal) life to his budding relationship with Agnes (Jessie Buckley). They marry and have three children, the boy ominously named Hamnet, who, like his stage counterpart, meets an early death. While wrestling with this loss, Shakespeare writes Hamlet, and that history reframes it as a work of mourning.

Invoking William Shakespeare comes with the challenge of living up to his storytelling, which Zhao and co-writer Maggie O’Farrell do by filling out not just William’s life but Agnes’ as well. We already know William will be a preternatural writer, and we see plenty of him agonizing over his words and struggling to balance work and family. The surprising beats are brought by Agnes, whose force is elevated to match William’s by giving her an almost magical connection to nature. She’s drawn to a striking tree, people gossip that her mother was a forest witch, and she has visions of the future. 

This is what opens up the film to Zhao’s impressionistic style, allowing her to conjure 16th-century England as a place that’s deeply entwined with nature. For the most part this is played for beauty, with elements of the sound design and cinematographer Lukasz Zal’s wide frames making it feel ever-present. At first, the forest offers healing and peace, but when the movie turns to tragedy, nature’s encroachment becomes sinister. Agnes’ stories and her ability to see the future play a cruel trick on her, and the film shifts to William’s stories being the comfort.

This progression means the film rides or dies on Buckley and Mescal’s performances, and both prove equal to the job. Mescal has less to do as he’s not seen as often. The film stays in Stratford with Agnes and their kids instead of following him to London, but in the moments he’s there, he crams in the complexity of William’s journey from loving father to celebrity to a wounded, lost man. We glimpse him rehearsing Hamlet with his actors. He admonishes their lack of passion, showing them how to spit out the lines, the moment riding the line between passion and breakdown as he strives to get this ode to his son right. Buckley gets many more opportunities to display her grief, but they come in a more straightforward way. Wailing, crying, lashing out. Buckley performs these moments well, but it’s not until the end of the film, when Agnes grapples with more complex emotions, that Buckley truly shines in her best performance to date.

The production around the stars is as lush as their emotional high points. It’s so tactile that it feels immediate, not like events from centuries ago. It’s a quality that William had in his own writing. He captured such deep truths that they’re still drawn upon all these years later. Zhao and her team utilize the same kind of truth, the loss of a child, to resurrect the historical facts behind one of Shakespeare’s most famous works. It’s embellished and with flights of fancy, of course, but Shakespeare took the same liberties with Hamlet. Within both stories are devastating moments that stand the test of time.

Release: in theaters now
Director: Chloé Zhao
Writers: Chloé Zhao, Maggie O’Farrell
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, Jacobi Jupe