Chloé Zhao (2025)
What’s in a name? In this case, a bit more than Juliet thought. The premise of Chloé Zhao’s screen version of Hamnet, as of the 2020 Maggie O’Farrell novel from which it’s adapted (Zhao and O’Farrell share the screenplay credit), is that the death of his only son in 1596 strongly influenced Shakespeare’s writing of Hamlet a few years later. Zhao wastes no time justifying the premise: a title card announces at the start that the names Hamnet and Hamlet were virtually interchangeable in Stratford-upon-Avon records during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. The film’s heroine, Mrs Shakespeare, is Agnes rather than Anne Hathaway. Those forenames may have been interchangeable, too (Anne was Agnes in her father’s will), but Zhao doesn’t mention that. You can’t help wondering if this renaming serves another purpose: to avoid confusion with the twenty-first century’s best-known Anne Hathaway – never mind that she (says Wikipedia) is forenamed for Shakespeare’s wife. If this was a factor, it might not be the daftest instance in Zhao’s film (I haven’t read O’Farrell’s book) of how Hamnet has been shaped to appeal to present-day audiences.
Chloé Zhao clearly means the opening title card to settle the argument, begging the question of what the argument is. Plenty of Shakespearean scholars had remarked on the similarity of the names Hamlet and Hamnet before Maggie O’Farrell wrote her novel. It’s hard to believe the similarity wasn’t in Shakespeare’s mind as he wrote Hamlet, but that obviously doesn’t mean his protagonist’s name originated in his son’s, or that Hamlet more largely is ‘about’ the loss of eleven-year-old Hamnet. Zhao is eager from an early stage to show Shakespeare’s life explaining his art, to crass effect. Will (Paul Mescal) is introduced as a tutor teaching Latin to local boys, when he catches sight through the window of a woman outside, using a falconry glove to hold a hawk. This is Agnes (Jessie Buckley): they get into conversation, even share a kiss before parting. Next thing, love-at-first-sight-smitten Will is scribbling away, and murmuring ‘It is the east, and Juliet is the sun’, which will come in handy when he eventually gets round to writing R&J. The climax to Hamnet is a performance of Hamlet at the Globe (more of that below). Here, Zhao chooses bits of the play’s text that, she thinks, suit her purpose, ignoring the elephant in the room, that Hamlet centres on a bereaved son rather than a bereaved father.
After that first meeting, Shakespeare learns from his mother, Mary (Emily Watson), that Agnes (pronounced the French way), although brought up by Joan Hathaway (Justine Mitchell), with Joan’s other children, is rumoured to be the daughter of a forest witch, hence her knowledge of herbal lore and remedies. (Agnes uses a herbal concoction to heal a cut on Will’s forehead.) Agnes and Will are only ‘hand-fasted’ during much of her first pregnancy but marry shortly before she gives birth. To do so, Agnes takes herself off alone to woodland, and sits at the roots of a significant tree – an expression of her maternal heritage, her own quasi-mystical bond with nature, her determined self-reliance. By the time Will and Agnes’ stepbrother, Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), arrive at the tree, she’s already holding a baby daughter. The next time Agnes goes into labour, Mary Shakespeare insists that she give birth indoors – in the room, Mary says, in which Will himself was born – where she can be assisted by her mother-in-law and a midwife (Laura Guest). Agnes protests furiously, claiming that such confinement bodes ill for the baby’s future. It’s striking that she doesn’t remember this when Hamnet dies. Chloé Zhao probably hasn’t forgotten but by this stage, she’s ready to put a different spin on Agnes’ feminist credentials.
Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) has a twin sister, Judith (Olivia Lynes). It’s she who’s first struck down by ‘the pestilence’ (bubonic plague?); her twin brother says he wants to take her place and lies down beside Judith in her bed; she promptly recovers and he promptly dies. Their father is away in London on theatre business. Hearing of his daughter’s grave condition, he gallops (on horseback) home to Stratford, to discover that Hamnet has indeed taken Judith’s place. The instant transfer of mortal illness from one twin to the other seems supernatural yet their mother, despite her occult heritage, doesn’t remark on this either. Instead, when Will tries to assure Agnes that ‘You did all you could’, she angrily reminds him ‘You weren’t there!’ – the starting point of a tirade that boils down to … typical man … married to his job … leaves me with all the child care … does he realise we’re living in not quite the seventeenth century? It’s a wonder that, when she eventually sees Hamlet, Agnes doesn’t complain that Ophelia and Gertrude are played by male actors (El Simons and Matthew Tennyson). The staff member checking tickets at Curzon Richmond for our show of Hamnet informed each female viewer on entry to the screen that the ladies’ loos weren’t flushing properly, adding every time ‘No problem with the gents – isn’t it always the way!’ She was probably keen to put the audience in the mood for what they were about to see.
It’s just as well the women in Chloé Zhao’s cast really do outshine the men, and remarkable how deft and purely passionate an actor Jessie Buckley has become. Agnes’ connection to the earth is made outwardly clear in the reddish-brown frock she mostly wears (Malgosia Turzanska designed the film’s costumes) – and Buckley’s portrait enriches the connection. Her voice is often, at first surprisingly, quite deep and guttural. In the courtship scenes, she seems earthy in both literal and metaphorical senses of the word; you see why Agnes fascinates Will. As the narrative progresses, with her character almost continuously in extremis, Buckley expresses anguish with complete commitment and considerable power – a real feat, when so much of the film is ridiculous. A further strength of Agnes’ close-to-nature look is the make-up by Nicole Stafford and her team: Buckley’s tawny face colouring not only complements her brunette hair but gives her a primitive quality. In her small role, Emily Watson is excellent as Shakespeare’s mother. Mary’s sadly resigned description of the children she lost, at birth or in infancy, gives us a sense of how common child mortality was at the time (and way beyond it). This obviously doesn’t diminish the tragedy of Hamnet’s death but does serve as a reminder that it’s far from extraordinary.
The make-up for Shakespeare is also good, but Paul Mescal’s performance is disappointing. In a film that rides roughshod over credibility, Mescal seems pointlessly anxious not to go wrong. Whenever Will isn’t raising his voice in anger, Mescal tends to neutralise his lines. He also comes across (Jessie Buckley doesn’t) as prematurely melancholy. You get the impression of a fine actor cautiously suppressing his acting instincts. You see those instincts at work on the few occasions that Mescal lightens up – and is transformed – as when Will, in the garden of the family’s home, teaches his son theatrical swordplay. Twelve-year-old Jacobi Jupe does very well as Hamnet – considerably better than his elder brother Noah, who is Hamlet in the Globe production. Those playing the other menfolk in the Shakespeare and Hathaway families either overact (David Wilmot as Will’s father) or are rather dull (Joe Alwyn).
Agnes and Will’s marriage doesn’t improve until the very end of Hamnet. Agnes mentions to her stepmother that her husband’s in London again, preparing his new comedy. Not a comedy but a tragedy, explains Joan, helpfully producing a playbill for Hamlet to prove it. Agnes, accompanied by Bartholomew, heads for London. She thinks better of Will when she discovers that he lives not in high style, as she’d supposed, but in a humble attic room. It’s back to square one, though, once Hamlet gets underway at the Globe theatre. Agnes is horrified to hear the name ‘Hamlet’, which she takes as desecration of her dead son’s name – never mind that she’s already seen it on the playbill. (If the idea is that Agnes is illiterate, as Anne Hathaway may well have been, why did her stepmother show her the playbill?) Her fellow audience members shush Agnes as she voices her outrage: the Globe crowd in the early 1600s was evidently as reverently quiet as the packed house in Curzon Richmond watching Hamnet in 2026.
This silly anachronism is eclipsed, though, by a kind of audience-participation conclusion to the Globe Hamlet, and the film. Agnes has pushed her way to the front row and the edge of the stage. She’s mollified when she catches sight of her husband playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and realises his play is a tribute to their son. In its final scene, as the protagonist is about to die, Agnes reaches out her hand to touch Hamlet’s. Others in the front row follow suit, but Hamlet addresses ‘The rest is silence’ as if to Agnes alone – a whisper rather than a stage whisper but this audience is too polite for anyone to complain. The soundtrack is filled instead with the swelling chords of Max Richter’s Barber Adagio-like ‘On the Nature of Daylight’. (Richter also wrote the original music for Hamnet.) As Hamnet lay dying, Zhao cut between his deathbed and shots of the boy wandering worriedly somewhere else, as if between two worlds. It’s rather baffling at the time. Zhao now virtually reprises the sequence, to show what his mother sees at the Globe – her son, after he has turned to give her a smile, disappearing offstage through an exit that recalls the woodland cave in which Agnes appeared at the start of the story. Consoled by this, she smiles too.
Yes, I get that Chloé Zhao is putting on screen what’s in Agnes’ mind’s eye, that Zhao didn’t intend a work of thoroughgoing naturalism and historical accuracy, that her film is meant to be poetically imaginative. But only when it suits: the director’s style in Hamnet is maddeningly (self-servingly) inconsistent. The twins’ arrival in the world is physically realistic because Zhao wants to get across the pains of childbirth (and Jessie Buckley does her director proud). Hamnet arrives before Judith, who’s apparently stillborn. When the midwife takes her and Mary says the baby ‘has gone to Heaven’, Agnes angrily denies this, and reminds her mother-in-law that, while pressured by her in-laws to attend a Christian church, she doesn’t share their beliefs. Fair enough, given Agnes’ paganism, but Zhao doesn’t even let the camera show the effect on Mary or the midwife of remarks they’d likely find hurtful as well as blasphemous – because her target audience doesn’t want a whiff of sincere Christian piety. Supernaturalism is OK, though. Agnes insists on holding Judith again and, in her mother’s arms, the baby comes to life.
Just before Hamnet dies, his father, in London, watches a piece of shadow puppet theatre, which depicts the plague carrying off its victims. This is one of Hamnet’s most visually compelling moments. The other London episodes are, for the most part, terrible. Before the climactic theatre performance, there’s a bit where Will rehearses his Hamlet and Ophelia in the ‘Get thee to a nunnery scene’. The playwright-director gets increasingly agitated, as he repeatedly instructs Hamlet ‘Again!’ You can understand why he thinks Hamlet is NBG, but why is demanding Will so imprecise about the point from which he’s instructing the actor to go ‘again’? Presumably because Will is distracted by grief at his son’s death, but you see why poor Hamlet gets confused. Zhao keeps the camera close in on Paul Mescal as he paces back and forth, yelling at Hamlet. The scene is somewhat redeemed when exasperated Will takes over speaking the lines – which Mescal does naturally yet commandingly (reminding you what you’re missing in most of the film). Zhao detracts even from this, though, by making Will’s reading so visually in-your-face.
Next, Will contemplates suicide, leaning on a bridge over the dark Thames and whispering, ‘To be, or not to be …’ Zhao’s sequencing here turns the rehearsal and his Hamlet’s effect on Will into an early example of watching-him-act-I-lost-the-will-to-live syndrome. Hamlet has hardly improved when the play’s on at the Globe. For a moment, you’re not sure if this is why Will starts crying, as he waits in the wings before his entrance as the Ghost. To be fair to Noah Jupe, nearly everyone else in the production is just as ropy – but ropy in a modern way: Zhao doesn’t seem to be trying to present an antiquated style of performance. And Hamlet’s sword fight with Laertes (Clay Milner Russell) is very convincing, almost incongruously so.
Łukasz Żal’s cinematography relies heavily on natural light. In the woodland sequences, this is often beautiful, occasionally lustrous, but the film is visually challenging in some of the indoor sequences. The dim interiors become part of the film’s pall. Hamnet is exceptionally short of (intentional) humour. With their brother dead and their father absent, Shakespeare’s elder daughter, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), reads to Judith part of Sonnet 12 (‘When I do count the clock that tells the time’) – not a sunny sonnet but, when Judith asks her sister to read it again and Susanna says no because she’s already just read it three times, it’s an unusually believable, as well as funny, moment. Earlier, the two girls and Hamnet, under Will’s supervision, perform for their mother a comical version of the witches’ opening number from Macbeth – again, chronologically unlikely (Hamlet was the earlier play) but still welcome, because the people on screen, for once, are enjoying themselves. This is the only time that Shakespeare appears to find theatre work invigorating. In London, when he’s not castigating his crap leading man, Will’s shivering in his attic garret.
The film’s nearly relentless dolour put me in mind of lines not by Shakespeare but by his near-contemporary John Webster:
‘Of what is ‘t fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror.’
In poetry anthologies, those great lines on the shrouding of the Duchess of Malfi are sometimes headed ‘Dirge’ – and that’s a fair description of Hamnet, despite the outbreaks of crackpot modernisation along the way. At the end of this threnodic film, you can understand why Agnes was under the impression her husband was working on a comedy. Compared with Hamnet, Hamlet is light entertainment.
11 January 2026
