![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/image_b3ab04.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Adapted from Maggie O\u2019Farrell\u2019s 2020 novel of the same name, \u201cHamnet<\/a>\u201d is an emotionally pulverizing drama that imagines how the death of William Shakespeare and Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway\u2019s only son might have inspired the creation of his greatest tragedy; think of it as \u201cShakespeare in Agony.\u201d And yet the violent beauty of this film<\/a>, which rips your soul out of your chest so completely that its seismic grief almost feels like falling in love or becoming a parent, is that it\u2019s as much about the experience of having a child as it is about the experience of losing one.\u00a0<\/p>\n More to the point, \u201cHamnet\u201d is a wrenching story about how those two experiences \u2014\u00a0so unalike in dignity \u2014 might ultimately be catalyzed by the same process of emotional transfiguration. In the first, your heart is placed into someone else\u2019s body. In the second, that body is subsumed into the world. To create anything, be it a person or a play, is to give a piece of yourself a life of its own; a life that you will never again be able to control or keep safe. It\u2019s to risk the infinite potential of an offering over the unborn reality of an idea, and to accept how even something that looks just like you can grow to assume unimaginable shapes. The author dies so that their work can be reborn anew forever.<\/p>\n In that light, one of the great strengths of O\u2019Farrell\u2019s novel is how the lightly historical context it invents around \u201cHamlet\u201d refuses to align with the play\u2019s general plot and most obvious themes, and Chlo\u00e9 Zhao\u2019s film \u2014 which she co-wrote with the author \u2014 respects how that 2+2=5 approach begs for a different kind of equation. Unlike \u201cShakespeare in Love\u201d (a masterpiece), \u201cSolo: A Star Wars Story\u201d (not so much), or any other examples of modern day origin stories, \u201cHamnet\u201d doesn\u2019t reverse engineer its drama from the stuff of its ultra-familiar source material. Sure, there\u2019s a brief aside in which Will (Paul Mescal) jots down the balcony scene from \u201cRomeo and Juliet\u201d after his first kiss with Agnes (Jessie Buckley), and a later moment where their three children roleplay as the witches from \u201cMacbeth\u201d on some gray English morning, but never does this movie rely on the lizard-brain thrill of recognition in order to stand on the shoulders of giants.\u00a0<\/p>\n On the contrary, \u201cHamnet\u201d derives its simple but overwhelming power from the disconnect between intention and response; it\u2019s a film that plants its roots in the liminal space between them, and keenly observes how the same kind of no man\u2019s land can form between a husband and a wife just as easily as it does between an artist and their work. By that measure, it would be hard to imagine a more fitting tribute to Shakespeare\u2019s most widely interpreted play.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n When the story begins in 1580, Will and Agnes are both arrestingly self-assured. He\u2019s a poor and scruffy Latin tutor whose interest in words, words, words makes him a \u201cuseless\u201d disappointment to his domineering father (like Agnes\u2019 severe mother-in-law played by Emily Watson, Will\u2019s father isn\u2019t hateful toward his eldest child so much as he is afraid to love him, lest the world decide to take him back). She\u2019s a mystical \u201cforest witch\u201d whose fascination with falconry \u2014 and broader attraction to communing with the non-human world \u2014 makes her stand out from her family even more than the blood red dress she wears in a world of medieval gray. Will abandons his students at the first sight of Agnes walking by the classroom window, and the two of them are sucking faces a minute later. She makes him feel giddy, and he makes her feel destined. (Will proposes to Agnes by circling her like a child playing duck, duck, goose, a funny bit of blocking in a film that\u2019s always careful to let enough light shine through its potentially oppressive darkness). They each see a vision of the world in the other.<\/p>\n Needless to say, Zhao\u2019s signature naturalism serves Agnes well. We first see her curled up in the tree hollow where she\u2019ll eventually give birth to her eldest daughter, and the elemental nature of \u0141ukasz \u017bal\u2019s cinematography allows her to retain that sense of earthiness wherever she goes. By a similar token, that stark visual language \u2014 complicated by Zhao\u2019s stately framing and related inclination toward surveillance-like interior shots that suggest the presence of a ghost looking down \u2014 helps to disabuse the drama of any potential staginess. Ditto the plainspoken dialogue, the wind that groans outside the Shakespeare family\u2019s house like an empty stomach, and the delicate Max Richter score that doesn\u2019t intrude on the drama until the film\u2019s nuclear-grade sobfest of a finale, which skirts dangerously close to emotional pornography as Zhao cues up the composer\u2019s most famous track. (Tear-jerkers come and go, but it\u2019s rare to see a movie that feels like it\u2019s farming you for moisture.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Anyway, for a fictionalized story about famous historical figures, \u201cHamnet\u201d is uncommonly attuned to the base immediacy of their feelings. With actors like these at Zhao\u2019s disposal, it would have been a tremendous waste for the movie to focus on anything else. Anchored by the primordial rawness of Buckley\u2019s astonishing performance, \u201cHamnet\u201d is never the least bit at risk of reducing Agnes to a trope. If anything, the film regards her as an even more powerful creative force than her husband; Will scribbles plays offscreen while Agnes sweats, screams on all fours, and shouts at the fates as she gives birth to their three children.<\/p>\n The kids grow up to embody the best of their parents, with Zhao paying special attention to the bond between twins Hamnet and Judith (Jacobi Jupe and Olivia Lynes, both terrific), who play together by swapping identities and trying to fool their parents. It\u2019s a fun Shakespearean flourish, of course, but one that lingers here for the casual sense of transference that it seeds for the semi-fantastical heartache that follows when Hamnet volunteers to absorb his sister\u2019s plague. Without exaggeration, the image of the cherubic eight-year-old boy standing lost in the bardo against a backdrop of painted trees is among the most devastating things that I\u2019ve ever seen in a movie (where did he go?), and I spent the remaining hour of \u201cHamnet\u201d feeling as if the weight of death itself were crushing down on my chest.\u00a0<\/p>\n Zhao is careful not to gild the lily (that \u201cOn the Nature of Daylight\u201d needledrop notwithstanding), but her Shakespeare doesn\u2019t exactly need a lot of runway to make his loss feel like your own. Between \u201cAftersun,\u201d \u201cAll of Us Strangers,\u201d and the upcoming \u201cThe History of Sound,\u201d no actor in the last five years has made me cry more than Paul Mescal \u2014 not because he\u2019s so fucking good at playing wounded, but rather because he\u2019s even better at playing the hurt of someone who doesn\u2019t know how to heal themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n His performance in \u201cHamnet\u201d is so cathartically transcendent because it at last rewards that search, a search that here extends beyond this world \u2014 if not the Globe \u2014 as Will starts looking for his son in the space between life and death. The pliability of English drama\u2019s most famous speech allows the suicidal dilemma of \u201cTo be, or not to be\u201d to double as an invitation to reject its binary proposition, as the movie doesn\u2019t invoke it until it\u2019s clear that \u2014 so far as his increasingly estranged parents are concerned \u2014 poor Hamnet is being and not being all at once. He isn\u2019t there, but he isn\u2019t not there either. \u201cHe can\u2019t have just vanished,\u201d she and her too-absent husband both agree, though they have very different ideas as to where he might have gone.\u00a0<\/p>\n If \u201cHamlet\u201d is typically considered to be a revenge story first and foremost, the extraordinary final sequence of Zhao\u2019s film (which is much less open to interpretation), maps a different meaning onto \u201cthe undiscovered country\u201d that lies beyond this mortal coil \u2014 one that may not align with Shakespeare\u2019s intention, but nevertheless hears a resonant stir of echoes in the silence at the end of the show. Hamlet and Hamnet may sound very different to our ears, but as the film\u2019s opening title card reminds us, they were interchangeable names at the time.<\/p>\n As we see \u201cHamlet\u201d performed for the first time with Agnes and her brother (Joe Alwyn) in the audience after months of not speaking to Will, the play metamorphosizes before our eyes into a vehicle for mutual communion between the griefstricken parents. Will\u2019s agony takes brilliant and uncontrollable new shape on the stage of the theater, while Agnes\u2019 heartache is given the conduit it so urgently needs by virtue of how she projects her own pain onto the performance.\u00a0<\/p>\n Just as Hamlet begs Horatio to live on and tell his story, \u201cHamlet\u201d finds Will pleading with Hamnet to do the same. This tragedy may not be the fate that either the playwright nor his wife ever wanted to imagine for their only son, but his story was never theirs to tell, nor could it ever hope to mean as much to anyone else. Because of \u201cHamlet,\u201d that angel-faced little boy will die again a million times over for centuries to come. But in that sleep of death and what dreams may come,\u00a0he will be reborn just as often, his memory rendered eternal across a more brilliant future than even William Shakespeare could have written for him.<\/p>\n Grade: A-<\/p>\n \u201cHamnet\u201d premiered at the 2025 Telluride<\/a> Film Festival. Focus Features will release it in theaters on Thursday, November 27.<\/p>\n Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Adapted from Maggie O\u2019Farrell\u2019s 2020 novel of the same name, \u201cHamnet\u201d is an emotionally pulverizing drama that imagines…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":108826,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75,1554,57355,209,60913],"class_list":{"0":"post-108825","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-hamnet","13":"tag-reviews","14":"tag-telluride"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Ask](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Ask-E-Jean.jpg\")
<\/a> ![\"Oscar](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/2232841882.jpg\")
<\/a> <\/p>\n