‘Hamnet’ review: Brevity isn’t the soul of it

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet is visually splendid and well-acted, but its overexplained emotions keep this Shakespeare tale at a distance.

Early in Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s ravishing Shakespeare fantasia, a young Will (Paul Mescal) reaches for Agnes’s hand with the earnest curiosity of one of his own characters. A latin tutor, he’s heard the village talk of how she can read a person the way others read weather, and he asks if it’s true you can know everything about someone with a single touch. Agnes (Jessie Buckley), ever attuned to forces both spiritual and literal, answers with a small, quiet correction: “Not everything.” It’s the sort of line that might raise an eyebrow on the page, another moment where characters speak as if they’re aware of the metaphor they’re participating in. But Zhao’s lovers occupy a world where gestures become omens and intimacy folds itself into prophecy. They talk like people who understand that every connection is both a mystery and an interpretation of something much bigger than themselves.

Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s celebrated novel, Hamnet is, on paper, a great story. It has all the stuff of Shakespeare in practice and theory. Forbidden romance, artistic yearning, a child lost too soon, and one of world literature’s most mythologized tragedies waiting in the wings. And Zhao approaches it with the sense of spiritual autobiography she brings to all her work, as it’s another tale of wayfarers navigating the void, another portrait of people learning to breathe inside grief without turning to stone. Her touch is reverent and often breathtaking. It’s also, at times, stifling.

“He’s got more inside him than any man I’ve ever met.”

The film opens not with Will, but with Agnes: barefoot in the undergrowth, half-feral and half-mystic, a woman whose communion with the natural world borders on the supernatural. Buckley plays her as if she’s made of root and flame. Wild, intuitive, brimming with unspoken knowledge. Her courtship with Mescal’s Will is the movie at its most fluid and fleeting. Łukasz Żal’s camera practically inhales the forest air around them, the dappling leaf-light conjuring Wong Kar-wai by way of Warwickshire.

Zhao resists the fussy museum-quality polish of traditional Shakespeare biopics. What she builds instead is a world that feels lived-in, closer to weather than architecture. Agnes and Will’s early life together has a looseness that suits them, captured in Żal’s drifting, curious camera. The film moves through their routines and responsibilities without announcing chapter breaks. Scenes feel less dramatized than observed. And when outside pressures begin to redirect the family’s course, it arrives the way most real change does. By quietly altering what the characters expect from one another, until the household seems to operate under a different set of rules. The film softens here, settling into a reflective stillness that becomes its dominant emotional register.

“I have no talent to waiting.”

Zhao is not a sentimental director by temperament, but here she seems unusually worried we won’t understand the emotional stakes. This manifests most glaringly in the film’s back half, when Will begins shaping his greatest grief into Hamlet. The conceit—that great art can transform unbearable loss into something immortal—should be devastating on its own. Instead, the film sometimes narrates its own meaning to us, as if anxious we might miss it.

A few choices feel overdetermined. The lingering cutaways to emotional breakdowns. Agnes murmuring, “He’s traded places with him,” as though interpreting the tragedy aloud just in case we haven’t connected the dots. And yes, the indulgent deployment of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight.” The piece is gorgeous, but at this point it’s emotional shorthand bordering on cliché. Zhao, usually so trusting of silence, leans on it like a crutch.

The final Globe performance is undeniably powerful, staged with a kind of hushed grandeur, but the film rarely trusts us to arrive at its catharsis unaided. Zhao keeps guiding the moment, underlining it in ways that make the emotional plumbing a little too visible.

“The women in my family see things.”

One as-yet-unspoken tension in Hamnet is how Zhao, long a champion of non-professional performers, now finds herself directing some of the most technically adept actors of their generation. Buckley thrives in this register, as she vibrates with a kind of primordial sorrow, all breath and grit and cracked-open interiority. She is the film’s gravitational center.

Mescal, meanwhile, gives an earnest, muscular performance that doesn’t always land. His Will is strongest in stillness, when he’s the dreamy hangdog poet discovering the cost of ambition. When the script demands theatricality, his choices feel labored, even performatively strained. A drunken tirade about writer’s block, shot in a static fish-eye angle that traps him like an animal in a barrel, is woefully overwrought. He’s a gifted, even generational actor, but here he feels slightly miscast by the film’s more declamatory impulses.

“What do you wish to do, Hamnet?”

There’s an irresistible meta-layer to Hamnet, a film about Shakespeare finding meaning in trauma, made by a filmmaker whose own work is a meditation on living with grief. At times, Zhao’s vision feels in conversation with A Ghost Story, Bright Star, and even The Tree of Life. As these are all stories about memory and guilt and the private exorcisms we call art.

But where those works often hide their mechanisms, Hamnet shows us the stitching. The metaphorical scaffolding—the son inspiring the play, the wife inspiring the ghost of a queen, the forest alive with ancestral whispers—sits a little too close to the surface. It’s all too moving, all too literal.

The bottom line.

Zhao has made a mournful, meticulously assembled film, full of tactile detail and anchored by at least one outstanding performance. I admired it more often than I felt it, though. Its sincerity is unmistakable, but the emotional architecture can feel a little too managed. Some viewers will be undone by the film’s sweeping biographical melancholy. I wasn’t quite there. The film’s beauty is evident, but its need to clarify every feeling keeps it at a slight remove.

Even so, when the production of Hamlet finally takes the stage and the story folds back on itself, the movie locates something genuine. For a moment, the themes feel less staged, more blissfully human. Zhao may gild the lily as it were, but the underlying gesture still works.

Hamnet is now playing in select theaters. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Focus Features. Read more articles by Jon Negroni here.