Paul Mescal stars in “Hamnet” as a grieving William Shakespeare whose struggle to write ultimately transforms his loss into the inspiration for “Hamlet.”
But early on in the film, cinematographer Łukasz Żal and director Chloé Zhao wanted to show how very different Will and his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) were, using framing and location to emphasize that contrast.
When they’re first introduced, Agnes is a free spirit living where the composition feels open. Will, on the other hand, “was in his head,” Żal says. “He is stuck in his family house, this place where he’s always teaching. The windows are small, and he’s always inside, always in a structure.”
That framing reflected a sense of suffocation.
Żal wanted to capture the magic of Agnes and Will falling in love. “What you feel, how you look at somebody’s eyes. You’re also very present, and the world looks beautiful,” he explains. “When they are together, we become closer and follow the emotions.”
However, their son Hamnet’s death changes everything. The skies become heavy, and there’s less light in the scenes. The colorful energy dissipates. “They are alone in their frames, and they’re not connected anymore,” he says. “The camera is still, slow and uncomfortably slow.”
Costume designer Malgosia Turzanska also reflected Will’s journey through her designs.
Inspired by sportswear, Turzanska padded Will’s clothing — almost as a form of protection — when Will is home with his emotionally abusive father.
She also added slashes in his sleeves, which start off as tiny and become larger and longer.
A tiny detail of his necklace — a toothpick — symbolized his father “picking” at him. After Hamnet’s death, Will travels to London, where he finishes “Hamlet.” When the production opens at the Globe Theatre, Will plays the ghost. For this, Turzanska researched ghost costumes and discovered how linen was historically used to bury the dead. As a result, she put Will in linen cloth and covered him in clay. The cracked clay reflects how broken of a man he is. At the very end, he washes it off, and he’s free.
In terms of the score, composer Max Richter says that when Will washes off the clay, “He just sort
of breaks to pieces. This is the almost darkened version of this choral, vocal cloud, which we’ve had from the beginning, connected to Agnes and nature. But it’s almost like the cloud of a moonless night. So it’s kind of super dark.”
On playing Will and going on this journey, Mescal says, “I didn’t think about navigating it from, like, love to grief. I think I looked at it as analyzing somebody’s life.”
He adds, “I was excited by the fact that I would get to show a lot of colors in terms of that, and the more that we could really make an audience feel these two people were madly in love with each other, the more that we would feel the loss of their connection in the middle act and the final act a little bit. So it was exciting to me, because I could see how it might feel to an audience to jump into the end when you’re covered in clay. Visually, we see cracks in his face.”
In that scene, Mescal says he felt the pressure to “land the plane” from a character’s perspective. “We see how present Agnes’ grief is with the children because, ultimately, she’s at home with them for the vast majority of the film. And that’s really Will’s opportunity with an audience — to let them in, to see the cost of the loss of Hamnet and the impact that it has had on him.”