A single work of art may, or may not, be able to change the world, but it can surely change a mind. To those unfamiliar with the plot of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, about William Shakespeare, his wife Agnes, and the death of their titular son, this may seem a peculiar takeaway from Chloé Zhao’s film version, adapted by both O’Farrell and Zhao. The first half or so covers William and Agnes’ meeting, marriage, and their life with their three children; their son’s shocking death midway makes the second half a portrait of unfathomable pain and grief, during which time the couple are living largely separate lives. Agnes raises her two remaining children in Stratford-upon-Avon, while William works on a new play in London. When it — Hamlet — debuts, only one person in the audience appears to grasp its true meaning: Agnes. She’s been suffering not only one devastating loss, but also the loss of the spousal emotional intimacy she’d once craved and cherished. But in that loss, the physical and emotional distance from her husband, he’d been developing not only arguably his most famous, accomplished work of art, but one designed, in some part, to help him cope with his son’s death. Watching it performed for the first time, Agnes’ anguish and bitterness begins to dissipate. Her mind changes.
Hamlet may, at least in concert with the rest of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, have changed the world, but Zhao’s Hamnet may not. The emotional astuteness of O’Farrell’s book is most tangible in this adaptation, but it’s belaboured to the point of bluntness. Zhao’s film is initially slight and banally pretty, accented by a portentousness in certain ominously over-emphasized details that signal its midway shift; thereafter, it’s an exercise in glum monotony, hitting the same sad note over and over in an apparent attempt at wringing every last tear out of every last viewer’s eyes. There’s no subtlety since it’s all so heavy-handed, and no nuance since Zhao seems occupied with this one thing alone. Grief, as all who have had the misfortune of experiencing it will know, is indeed a slog, but it’s hard to discern any need for a film about grief to be a similar slog.
Zhao really only exhibits delicateness in Hamnet, and the film lacks the tonal modulations required to make its affective aims succeed. Her soft and slow approach may place some viewers in a rapture, or it may leave some searching for depth and details that simply aren’t there. And all the softness serves only itself — Lukasz Zal’s cinematography is lovely but inexpressive, Max Richter’s score pleasant but formulaic. The film overcomes its engineered poetic niceness only once: the central tragedy is obviously inevitable from early on, but it’s the sole moment when things snap out of their general lugubrious torpor. That it does so is down to the contribution of Jessie Buckley.
As Agnes, Buckley is vivid without being melodramatic, sensitive without settling into mumbling mundanity (the same cannot be said for Paul Mescal as William, whose riverside reading of the celebrated “To be or not to be” speech is comical in its wrenchingly heartfelt understatement, not to mention contradictory when compared to the energetic performance he tries to coax out of his players in a preceding rehearsal scene). In her son’s death scene, Buckley delivers a truly startling, authentic depiction of sudden agony and disbelief. Amid all of Zhao’s futile stabs at eliciting an emotional response from her audience through a surfeit of piety, it’s here and only here that it’s elicited, and it’s through Buckley’s astonishing access to the most primal human feelings.
Buckley aside, though, Hamnet is an exceptionally and inescapably dreary film. It has a lone purpose: to make its audience weep and weep and weep. Zhao’s film isn’t built to make you think, or to make you feel anything other than heartache — it’s a numbing watch, and an infuriating one, since the director misses her mark so consistently, and in such a consistent way. Hamnet is a film built to melt even the stoniest hearts, but in its insistence on doing so, it might just turn a few melted ones to stone.
Published as part of LFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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