HAMNET

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

Maggie O’Farrell’s lauded 2020 novel Hamnet is a lyrical imagining of the lives of William Shakespeare’s family. It would seem, upon reading, near impossible to adapt into a film. Film-maker Chloé Zhao has attempted to do so anyway, and the result is a stately, occasionally lugubrious drama whose closing minutes are among the most poignant in recent memory.
Hamnet was, records tell us, Shakespeare’s son, who died at a young age and is thought to have inspired, at the very least, the title of Hamlet, the story of a young prince who meets a tragic end. What O’Farrell and now Zhao imagine is that the writing of Hamlet was an exercise in grieving, a way for Shakespeare to honour his son and bid him adieu.
Hamnet invents many other facets of Shakespeare’s history. It dreams up the courtship of young William (Paul Mescal), then a Latin tutor, and slightly older Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), an oddball loner about whom the villagers whisper in fearful tones. William is drawn to exactly that strangeness, the individuality that will come to inform so much of the family’s domestic routine. Zhao spends a fair amount of time on these early days, maybe too much. Whatever Zhao doesn’t supply, though, is mostly made up for by the richly felt performances of the film’s two leads. Mescal is able to be far more expressive than he’s been allowed in quieter films such as Aftersun and The History of Sound. It is a pleasure to see the full breadth of his range, from seductive to shattered. It’s Buckley, though, who wholly envelops the film, giving staggering breath and body to Hamnet’s portrait of loss. She is nothing short of a wonder. It is on her shoulders that the film’s knockout climax rests. As she rises to the task, it is as if she is no longer acting but instead channelling a whole history of human lamentation.
In the closing, as Agnes says goodbye to the son who slipped away it proves a lovely experience, mourning for Agnes and William’s loss and for our own, amazed and relieved that a faraway, unknowable person has made something to connect us all.