HAMNET

FIVE STARS A couple lose their son to the plague. A tragedy that could have destroyed them, unites them.

DRAMA UK English #HAMNET Starring Jess Buckley, Paul Mescal

There are films that announce arrive with fanfare and then there are films like HAMNET, which land softly, almost apologetically, and undo you with their grace. Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel is such a work. A period drama of rare emotional intelligence that understands grief is not a dramatic event but like a long, private weather system that alters everything in its path.

Set largely in rural Warwickshire, the story centres on the courtship then marriage of William Shakespeare and Agnes (Anne) Hathaway, long before literary immortality came calling. She is portrayed as a woman deeply attuned to the natural world with an instinct to heal, to read herbs, animals and seasons with a sensitivity that borders, in the eyes of her neighbours, on the suspicious. Her closeness to nature and eye for the future gives rise to whispers of witchcraft, an ambiguity the film handles delicately, never confirming nor denying, but allowing superstition and fear to shape how she is seen. 

Shakespeare, meanwhile, is locked in conflict at home. His somewhat thuggish father expects him to take up the family trade of glove-making - a solid, practical future young Will firmly rejects. His heart sings poems and instead, he chooses teaching to pay the bills and writing to fill the mind. His choices not framed as youthful arrogance, but as necessity. A decision, as the film dryly reminds us, that worked out rather well.

This, however, is not a film interested in literary biography or bardic myth-making. Zhao and co-writer O’Farrell are far more interested in the people history leaves behind, such as the Shakespeares’ daughter Judith and her twin Hamnet. When the boy dies under a cloud Agnes had foreseen, the film resists obvious narrative beats. There are no grand speeches or swelling musical cues. Instead, black loss gradually settles into the film, a darkness expressed through silence, distance, and the reluctant recalibration of daily life.

As with her Oscar winning NOMADLAND, Zhao’s direction is patient and confident, trusting mood over momentum. The pacing may test viewers raised on faster, noisier period dramas, but the reward lies in the film’s emotional authenticity. This is grief as it is lived rather than performed. The English countryside, beautifully photographed, feels tactile and real; mud on the road, smoke in the air. Nothing looks ornamental. Everything feels inhabited.

The performances are central to the film’s success. Jessie Buckley is extraordinary as Agnes, grounding the film with a portrayal of motherhood that is fierce, intuitive and deeply felt. Her grief is not demonstrative; it is elemental. Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare is deliberately understated; fractured, unexpectedly thoughtful and believable as a man not yet aware that art will become his refuge. Their shared scenes crackle with intimacy and restraint.

HAMNET does not offer easy catharsis, nor does it rush toward meaning. Its final act, which gently gestures toward the creation of Hamlet, lands not as explanation but a suggestion that art can’t cure grief, but can give it shape. Quietly profound and beautifully made, HAMNET, like the book, is a film that lingers long after the credits roll. 

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