Hamnet (2025 | UK, USA | 126 minutes | Chloe Zhao)
If I know one thing for sure, it’s that when Paul Mescal rolls into Telluride, I’m going to leave the theater stabbed in the guts in the absolutely best way. His turn, here as William Shakespeare in the film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, continues that trend. However, on this mystical wooded stage far from the bustle of Londontown, the great playwright is but a supporting player in this tragic imagining of an exceptional woman and the growing family who inspired his greatest works.
Director Chloe Zhao sheds the special effects that she gave for a spin with The Eternals and grounds the literary adaptation in the rough-hewn, if immaculately dirty, greenery of the forested countryside. It’s not a full course-correction back to the shimmering immediacy of The Rider, but is at least a return to the closely observed character work, reverence for nature, and great facility with actors that won her Oscars for Nomadland. Tangentially an origin story of perhaps the second-most famous tragedy in the dramatic canon, if not the play most likely to have caused an American high school student to have memorized a soliloquy of iambic pentameter, those looking for a DaVinci Code for Hamlet may find themselves disappointed or at least a little peeved looking for Easter eggs.
Instead, the film’s true interest is less with the Bard as a Young Man than with the woman who stole his heart at first glance. Like Mescal’s Shakespeare, having returned to his hometown from scholarly pursuits to tutor a neighboring farmer’s sons to pay off his own father’s debts, we first encounter Agnes (Jessie Buckley) in nature. Zhao opens the film with her nestled in the roots of a giant tree, having spent the day hunting with her hawk and gathering medicinal roots. For William, it’s love at first sight. A daughter in a long line of mystics, she also sees something in their future when she first clasps his hand with her mud-encrusted thumb.
Their ill-advised courtship is a charming rush of storytelling and carnality that soon finds them wedded, a disappointment to their families — not exactly alike in dignity or willingness to remain grudged — aside from Agnes’s ever-supportive brother (Joe Alwyn as Bartholomew Hathaway). Alongside portents and visions, their family grows in the Shakespeare family attic. Their days are sun-dappled, and Zhao paints the time period as one where traces of magic still linger, be it in premonitions, superstitions, or folk remedies. When the birth of her second child turns out to be the unexpected birth of here second and third children: the twins Hamnet and Judith (later played by Jacobi Jupe and Olivia Lynes, both exceptional), we see that her visions for the future may have been more cloudy than she knew.
William finds separation from his long-abusive father through leatherwork at a theatre troupe in the city. Candlelit nights find him scratching out early drafts of plays and soliloquies. Growing success and determination to build his career keep him away from home for long stretches, but his returns are lyrical episodes with his beloved children. We see them trying out roles in the plays to come — the twins switching places, the trio dressing up as the Weird Sisters, Hamnet dreaming of heroic swordplay — and embracing the idyllic tempos of rural life. It’s these reveries that make the intrusion of a plague that will tear the family asunder all the more devastating.
Zhao’s is absolutely a movie of very big emotions, deployed precisely for maximum effect and delivered with stunning power by an exceptional cast. Agnes is a bit of a spacey woods witch, but Buckley plays her with such self-possessed intelligence and otherworldly awareness that the character is fully realized and credible in a world of great mystery. Although her relationship with her mother-in-law (Emily Watson) is initially strained, it becomes one of great compassion that also reinforces the great uncertainties that prevailed, especially for women of the era. Mescal’s openhearted allure and irresistible draw to a future in letters serves as a counterpoint that lets us forgive the frequent absences that understandably result in growing resentment from a wife grounded to the countryside (in part for fear of the city’s foul air).
Eventually, though, tragedy of course arrives on those shores. By then Zhao has taught us how to watch her movie, the blend of realism and fantastical merging into a heart-rending nightmare from which the family can never fully recover. Life does march ever onward to the beats of an emotionally-wrenching Max Richter score, William and Agnes coping in their own flawed ways. As it moves to a heart-rending final act, the film’s center of gravity shifts toward William wrestling with demons through his work, unlocking an oft-absent character and leveraging an enduring legacy. If you’ve bought in, the way their paths entwine in the final scenes is an absolute showstopper of catharsis.
We’ve perhaps become too cavalier in tossing around the word “shattering”, but there is simply no other word for the physical effect of Jessie Buckley’s theater-piercing wail of despair or Paul Mescal’s transmutation of unceasing waves of grief in the wake of a death of a beloved boy. With extraordinary dexterity, Chloe Zhao divines the alchemical power of art to stretch across an unknowable gulf, hinting at something tremulous and meaningful on the other side of impossible sadness.
An earlier version of this review ran when Hamnet had its world premiere at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival. The film opens in limited release this weekend, including at SIFF Uptown. Bring tissues.
Image Credit: Agata Grzybowska courtesy of Focus Features