Hamnet

The Name in the Margins

One letter separates the boy who dies from the play that lives forever. Chloé Zhao’s *Hamnet* hangs its whole emotional weight on that tiny historical quirk. In late sixteenth-century documents, Hamnet and Hamlet were often used almost interchangeably, the sort of detail scholars have worried over for ages. Maggie O'Farrell turned it into her hugely popular 2020 novel, and Zhao adapted it with her. But the film isn’t really chasing literary trivia or Shakespeare scavenger hunts. Zhao keeps digging past the legend, down into the soil. What she seems to care about is simpler and harsher: what becomes of a marriage after a child is gone.



If you know *Nomadland* or *The Rider*, Zhao’s instinct for landscape will feel familiar right away. She treats Tudor England less like heritage cinema and more like a living patch of mud, bark, wind, and animal life. Her Stratford-upon-Avon is no polished Renaissance postcard; it feels damp, tangled, almost feral. Agnes (Jessie Buckley), the woman history records as Anne Hathaway, first appears beneath a vast tree in a red dress, more woodland apparition than future wife to a literary giant. Zhao’s forest groans and breathes. It shakes most of the museum-glass stiffness out of the period-drama format. The frame barely cares about the corset stitching. It wants the dirt under Agnes’s nails while she handles a falcon.

Buckley gives the kind of performance you feel in your shoulders. I don't know that it works every second, but she's magnetic even when the film overreaches. Agnes is known around town as a mystic and healer, someone who can read what others would rather hide. Buckley plays that not as delicate otherworldliness but as raw alertness. When Will (Paul Mescal) first sees her through the window, she looks ready to spring away at any second. Zhao reportedly put the two actors through tantric workshops to build a "kinetic trust," and yes, there is a strange charge between them. Then Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), their eleven-year-old son, falls ill, and that charge drains out of her body. Buckley makes grief look like a physical collapse.



Mescal, meanwhile, has the near-impossible task of playing a young William Shakespeare without turning into a capital-M Monument. The film barely even says his name. What Mescal finds is a man almost mute beside his wife's elemental force. Then the second act lands its blow. Hamnet dies, and the movie's quiet naturalism tears open under the sheer volume of the parents' pain.

This is the stretch that will send some viewers running. Zhao refuses tasteful, tidy grief. The sorrow here is ugly, prolonged, and loud. A critic at *RogerEbert.com* called the film's anguish "big and shrieky and shrill," arguing that Zhao lingers on suffering until it starts to feel voyeuristic. I get that reaction. At times the howling and bodily devastation slide close to melodrama, and the film pushes so hard that it can feel punishing. Zhao turns the emotional dial nearly all the way and occasionally overshoots.



Still, the last act finds an eerie grace. The movie leaves the woods for the Globe Theater, where Agnes watches her husband's grief remade as performance. Zhao keeps the camera fixed on her face as a boy—Noah Jupe, real-life brother of Jacobi Jupe, in a beautifully pointed bit of casting—steps out as the Prince of Denmark. The scene plays in silence, mostly as recognition. The play does not apologize, and it certainly does not heal everything. It feels more like a husband using the one language he has left to tell his wife that he has not forgotten their son. Whether that could ever mend a marriage is another question, but Zhao turns it into something deeply, painfully human.