‘Hamnet’ Review: Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in a Portrait of Shakespeare’s Family

You don’t need a degree in psychology to realize that there is more connecting Hamnet and Hamlet than a simple grammatical resemblance. Still, it is curious that this has never been the dominant way of reading the central work of William Shakespeare’s career. While scholars of his life and work have never ignored the obvious link between the name of his only son and that of the famous Danish prince, the relationship was rarely understood as a direct one. This may be because Shakespeare’s private life in Stratford—about which there is relatively little concrete information—has traditionally been treated as secondary to his public career as a playwright in London. Moreover, the courtly plot and the major thematic concerns of Hamlet are not especially easy to trace back to specific events in the author’s real life.

This brings us to the obligatory disclaimer. Like virtually every review written about this film, this one contains a SPOILER involving something that has been common knowledge for more than 430 years. If you would rather not know it just yet, feel free to skip ahead and come back later. Hamnet does not focus primarily on the son of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, but instead on Anne herself—called “Agnes” in both the film and Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, perhaps to avoid confusion with the contemporary actress. For much of its first half, the film tells the story of their love: one that, like so many others, begins with tenderness, joy, and shared hopes, only to darken over time as tragedy enters the picture.

Agnes (played with near–Meryl Streep–level ferocity by the remarkable Jessie Buckley) is a woman raised by an adoptive family in late-16th-century Stratford. Deeply connected to nature—to trees, animals, plants, and their healing properties—and guided by a form of pagan spirituality that gives her a sense of foresight, Agnes is viewed as an odd figure, someone others keep at a distance, a “forest witch.” The young Will (Paul Mescal, offering a more restrained yet quietly revealing performance), a Latin tutor at the time, is either oblivious to this reputation or simply unconcerned by it, and quickly falls in love with her. Despite his family’s opposition, the two marry.

From there, the film explores a period in which their relationship, while fundamentally solid, becomes strained by family tensions, William’s lack of interest in physical labor, and his growing frustration at failing to establish himself as a writer while living in the countryside. They first have a daughter, Susannah, and a few years later twins, Hamnet and Judith. This stage of their lives is presented as their happiest. However, Agnes’s unsettling visions, Judith’s fragile health, and the circulation of the bubonic plague make it clear that these years of contentment are precarious. Sooner rather than later, trouble will arrive—and, the film suggests, Shakespeare’s career will ultimately be nourished by it.

Directed by Chloé Zhao (Nomadland, The Rider, and, best left unmentioned, her later Marvel outing), Hamnet both is and isn’t one of those “prestige films” engineered for awards season. Zhao avoids many of the usual period-drama clichés: the tone is initially lyrical and contemplative, there is little indulgence in historical reconstruction or lavish costuming (Buckley wears essentially the same highly symbolic red dress throughout a story that spans decades), the music is comparatively restrained, and the visual language and scene construction align more closely with arthouse traditions than with grand, epic costume dramas. And yet, despite these choices, tragedy gradually asserts itself, bringing with it heightened emotional intensity, powerful performances, and symbolism in abundance.

It is within this tension that the film truly lives. Buckley is consistently excellent, but she becomes especially striking once Agnes begins to suffer—and rarely leaves that register afterward. She is deeply moving in the scene where, during the birth of the twins, she believes she is about to lose one of them (Judith) and manages to save her. By the time the tragedy reaches its full weight, Agnes exists almost permanently within a state of emotional rupture. It is undeniably affecting, yet there is also a sense that the film occasionally lingers too lovingly on the aesthetic impact of Buckley’s performance, pushing Hamnet perilously close to the very clichés it seemed intent on avoiding.

Mescal, by contrast, feels more at ease in the film’s earlier register. His Will—largely absent, working in London when the most devastating events unfold at home—is emotionally restrained, withholding expression until the moment when everything finally breaks loose. For some viewers, that release will mark the emotional peak of his narrative arc; for others, depending on how they respond to the dialogue (which may sound uncomfortably familiar), it flirts with self-parody. This tonal approach continues through the film’s final stretch, as the emotional fracture within the couple begins to mend, kintsugi-style, through the medium of theatre.

With Shakespeare transforming a family tragedy into Hamlet—a melancholic sublimation of private grief into one of the foundational works of Western culture—the film ultimately presents art as a strategy of repair. Not just a means of healing for the couple themselves, but a way of reconnecting with others and with a world that, at the time, was also living through a pandemic. As the mournful (and, admittedly, somewhat on-the-nose) strains of Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight play, Chloé Zhao gestures toward a process of collective catharsis: a requiem for dark times that resonated in 1600—and still does, more than four centuries later.