Hamnet won big at the Golden Globes, so how good is it?

Review by

Sarah Watt

Film reviewer·New Zealand Listener·

12 Jan, 2026 11:30 PM3 mins to read

Sarah reviewed for the Sunday Star Times until 2019. After a career change to secondary school teaching, she now she works in alternative education with our most disadvantaged rangatahi.

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Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in Hament. Buckley shines as Bard’s wife in tale of grief inspiring great art while Mescal makes a wonderful Shakespeare for the 21st century. Photo / Supplied

Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao, is in cinemas from Thursday, January 15.

This extraordinarily moving and at times exhilarating film about the most famous name in theatre shows that cinematic storytelling isn’t dead yet.

It’s the sublimely acted and beautifully photographed adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, a
fictional musing on the real-life marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne “Agnes” Hathaway and, in particular, their young son, here posited as the inspiration for the play Hamlet.

Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter) is breathtaking as free-spirit Agnes – a historically accurate alternative name for Shakespeare’s wife – a self-possessed young woman who feels at one with the earthy mysteries of the forest but on the outer of her father’s stepfamily.

She captures the eye and heart of a young tutor named Will (Paul Mescal), and their passionate and deeply enmeshed relationship as portrayed by these two superlative young Irish actors is utterly captivating.

Mescal makes a wonderful Bard for the 21st century: here, the literary genius is portrayed as loving, loyal but intellectually tortured, extinguishing the smeared memory of Joseph Fiennes’ playboy playwright from 1998’s Shakespeare in Love.

In Hamnet, the angle is not that Shakespeare spent months away in London for romantic kicks, but juggling pursuit of a career while desperately missing his family back in Stratford.

And it’s in this family, held together by Buckley’s extraordinary strong-willed Agnes with the marvellous Emily Watson as her mother-in-law, that the film’s action takes place, as the women strive to keep three beloved children alive.

Set in a time in England when about a third of all children died by age 10, a sense of foreboding hangs over the story even if you don’t know the family history.

As the plague sweeps through the country, Will watches ghoulish puppet shows on London streets while Agnes concocts natural remedies to protect her vulnerable young from the pestilence – until a terrible and unexpected tragedy changes the course of literary history.

Chinese-born director Chloé Zhao won an Oscar for Nomadland, which had Frances McDormand acting with non-actors as a woman forging a peripatetic life in 21st-century America.

Zhao’s effortless switch to this scripted period drama with well-known historical underpinnings is stunning, particularly given her acknowledgement that much of the Shakespearean dialogue (a chunk of the story depicts a Globe production of Hamlet) was beyond her comprehension.

Rating out of five: ★★★★★

To read Sarah Watt’s review of the Golden Globes other big winner One Battle After Another go here.

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