We all know how it ends.
That’s the strange power of Hamnet – its inevitability.
The film, directed by Chloé Zhao, adapted by her and Maggie O’Farrell’s from O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel, begins beneath the shadow of this foreknowledge: Shakespeare’s young son will die, and from that death will come the greatest tragedy in English literature. The question is not what happens, but how we get there, how personal loss is transformed into collective myth.
At the heart of the film is Jessie Buckley’s Agnes, the woman history remembers as Anne Hathaway. Rooted in herbs, rhyme, and the rituals of care her mother taught her, Agnes moves through the film with an almost feral grace. Her connection to the natural world is tactile and ancient: we first encounter her coiled in the roots of a tree. Her domain is the earth, and her tragedy is that even her deep understanding cannot ward off death.
Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare, by contrast, is interior, hunched over candlelight, quill scratching against parchment. His dark-eyed intensity — offbeat, searching — finds its counterpoint in Buckley’s wildness. We see why she appeals to him – her rootedness, her otherworldliness – and why he to her: his mind’s reach, his hunger. He promises what history tells us he will not keep: to be present, to love steadily, to remain. Again, we know that will not be possible.
Their story has often been told as if they didn’t truly love each other. The film rejects that notion. Here, love is neither constant nor idealized – it is fresh, defiant, then fragile, faltering, challenged by need and circumstance. In a world that is treacherous and exigent – where, as Hamlet’s wary watchful mother (Emily Watson) reminds us, no one is truly safe – how can love endure?
Zhao, best known for Best Picture winner Nomadland, brings her signature blend of intimacy and scope to Renaissance England. Her camera finds both vastness and stillness: the sky stretching endlessly over a small town; a hand trembling over parchment; grief rippling like wind through fields. Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal (The Zone of Interest) shape a visual world of pale light and muted greens – green woods, white sky, white daub, and dark beams. There’s a cave that becomes a gateway, a metaphor for the descent into the underworld.
Hamnet is not a story of genius, nor a tale of historical fidelity. It is a deeply interior portrait of grief – of two people bound by love and undone by death; of grief, both private and howling. What might have been a dry biographical exercise becomes a slow, then searing immersion into the inner weather of unimaginable loss and how we try to make sense of it.
The film ends not with resolution but with grace – a quiet communion among audience, actors, and ghosts. Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet, becomes in this telling not just a play but an act of survival – an attempt to overcome death. In a way, it succeeds.
Hamnet was screened as part of the 2025 London Film Festival. It’s due to be released theatrically on 9 January, 2026.
