"Hamnet" review — Into the "undiscovered country" of love, grief, and Shakespeare
“To be, or not to be — that is the question.”
Caught between the living and the dead, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a haunted work. That’s not even a reference to the ghost of the title character’s father, who stalks around the castle grounds in the play’s first act. The play’s dialogue is focused on themes of death, suicide, revenge, violence, self-harm, and poetic reflections on the nature of the “undiscovered country,” as Hamlet describes it himself, that comes beyond the grave. In the tragedy, Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, seeks revenge on his uncle, Claudius, whom he discovers murdered his father, the late King Hamlet. It’s a heavy, weighty text that’s full of grief and unresolved pain over the loss of a loved one, which spurs on a vicious cycle of death. I certainly don’t need to convince the reader of the importance and enduring legacy of Hamlet. It’s one of the most revered texts in English literature. Its quotations have become part of the lexicon. It’s a staple of high school classes. And, as writer Maggie O’Farrell and a multitude of scholars have noticed, the play’s title bears an awfully close resemblance to the name of Shakespeare’s real-life son, Hamnet, who died tragically young in the years immediately before the play was first produced.
Despite its late 16th-century stylings, it’s easy to spend most of Hamnet’s runtime forgetting who Paul Mescal is playing. When Joe Alwyn’s Bartholomew Hathaway declares that he’s looking for a certain “William Shakespeare” in the crowded streets of London, it feels a bit odd. Mescal’s “Will” sports a close-shaven beard, a measured tone of voice, and a fashionable earring. Shakespeare’s name is hardly said during the film, making Alwyn’s use of it stand out all the more. He’s called “my love,” “son,” and “father” by the rest of the film’s cast, but never given any sense of aggrandizement. This is intentional. This isn’t the Bard’s story. As much as Hamnet features an account of Shakespeare crafting the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark, this film is primarily about Agnes — more commonly spelt as “Anne” — Hathaway, Will’s wife, here played in revelatory fashion by Jessie Buckley. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Maggie O’Farrell (who also co-authored the film’s screenplay), the film is a beautiful, impassioned meditation on grief and darkness. Nothing short of a tear-jerker and a stunning return to form for director Zhao, Hamnet transcends the potentially reductive labels of “period piece” or “biopic” into a universal story of loss, grief, and familial love.
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| Image via Focus Features. |
Hamnet, the latest film by Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao, tells the story of Will and Agnes Shakespeare’s first twenty years together, from their initial meeting in Stratford-upon-Avon until the climactic first performance of Hamlet in the Globe Theatre years later. Anchored in a brilliant performance by Buckley and supported beautifully by Mescal, the film fictionalizes the story of the Shakespeares beyond any notion of biography (which is a necessity thanks to the scant historical record of their lives), transforming it into a story that goes beyond another “film about Shakespeare.” Agnes is portrayed as a woman with a strong affinity for the natural world, including an intimate knowledge of natural medicines, a deep connection with an animistic spiritual view, and foreboding, almost prophetic, dreams. She lives with her step-mother and three brothers (one older and two younger), when she meets an attractive young Latin tutor, Will, who is working for the Hathaways to pay off his father’s debts. The two spend time in the knotted forests around the Hathaway estate, where Agnes shares with him her love of the natural world and is enchanted by the young man’s Grecian myths. Swiftly falling in love, Will and Agnes decide to sire a child out of wedlock to force their antagonistic families to allow them to marry. This is all before Will ever has the idea of leaving Stratford for London.
Zhao (who serves triple duty as director, co-writer, and co-editor) is at home with this material, letting her naturalistic instincts run wild with how she directs her actors, but with a narrative that gives her more explicit push. It’s a much-needed comeback for Zhao, the director behind the Best Picture-winner Nomadland, whose previous film, Marvel Studios’ Eternals (my review here), would have been a career-ender for a lesser talent. Instead, Zhao has returned with what is easily the strongest feature in her career and is well within this year’s finest work. The screenplay, setting the tone for the rest of the film, explodes with tender characterization and carefully constructed empathy, which Zhao will exploit in the film’s later sections when tragedy befalls Agnes and Will. It handles its moments of levity and hardship with equal deftness. The film is very playful in the moments where it does indulge in the Shakespeare of it all. In the flirtatious dialogue between the two young lovers, as Will recounts the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to an enraptured Agnes, O’Farrell and Zhao delight in laying the seeds of Will’s work in the words exchanged, even if we see little of the end result. In fact, before the film’s finale, the most we see of a Shakespeare play is a brief moment in which the three Shakespeare children recreate the opening scene of Macbeth, dressed as the play’s three witches. While some might find uses of phrases like “the rest is silence” in the dialogue to be corny and indicative of biopics about artists, Zhao manages to escape this problem, although it’s only justified later in the film.
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| Image via Focus Features. |
At Agnes’ behest and with her pulling a few strings, Will eventually leaves for London to fulfil his dream of becoming a writer for the theatre. Agnes and Will go on to have three children together: Susanna, their eldest, and twins Judith and Hamnet, the title character. Will spends most of his time away, leaving Agnes alone with the children. She won’t go to London with him just yet, which she justifies through all manner of seasonal issues, but someday, she promises, she will. But Will sees through her. She’s afraid. As a girl, Agnes had a dream in which she saw a vision of her deathbed and, at her side, two of her children. As a woman, she has been given three. She’s afraid that one day, the black spectre of death that haunts England will come for her children. However, avoiding London only seals the fate of her children. One morning, with Will gone again for London, Judith wakes up with distinctive boils on her skin. Agnes fights to save her child from the death knell already rung for her, pleading with fate to spare her daughter. But it’s a seemingly spiritual bond between the siblings Judith and Hamnet that, in the end, saves her and sentences the boy to painful death. “I will be brave,” Hamnet tells the memory of his father, who charged him with that command on the eve of his most recent departure.
Buckley tears her heart out on screen during the film’s most tragic scenes, screaming with pain and letting out an incredibly charged and visceral performance. Buckley pulls together Agnes’ pain of losing a child, her resentment towards Will for leaving, and her own unresolved childhood grief into a fascinating mixture of violent, stormy emotions. Will’s mother, Mary (played by Emily Watson), who herself lost many of her children at an early age, becomes a critical counterbalance to Agnes. Watson evens out Buckley’s extremes with a more resigned and less emotionally available performance. These speak to the strength of the entire cast, as well. The chemistry between the Shakespeare family, and scenes in which mother and father enjoy languid afternoons with their children at the Hathaway estate. Newcomer Jacobi Jupe, who plays the eleven-year-old Hamnet, might be one of the film’s strongest elements, even if his performance is relatively limited to a small section of the film’s runtime. Not long after he returned to Stratford hurriedly after hearing the news that Judith had fallen ill, and to discover Hamnet’s death when he arrived home, Will, again, leaves for London, angering Agnes. The two grow cold.
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| Image via Focus Features. |
The film’s visual language is ever vibrant, teeming with visual metaphors and imagery that mix its themes in beautifully rendered fashion. Zhao has recruited cinematographer Łukasz Żal, the Polish talent behind the camera of Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (my review here). The two paint beautifully photographed scenes of the deep English forests, the streets of Stratford, and murky-coloured interiors. Moss, lichen, skies, birds, shadowy doorways, and fire take on the film’s themes of death and creation into palpable images. Decay and rebirth are symbolized in rotted tree trunks, giving way to new creation. A cave in the middle of the Hathway’s forest becomes one of the film’s most frequent subjects, a sight which both comforts and forebodes. The cave is a womb, literalized when Buckley’s Agnes gives birth to her first child at its mouth. But it’s also a tomb. It’s the great “undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns.”
The film’s stunning final act (as shown through the film’s marketing, so this isn’t a spoiler) sees Agnes and her brother (played by Alwyn) arrive in London to see Will’s latest play, which she had previously believed to be a comedy. Instead, the advertisement for the play bears her son’s name in its title (a piece of text at the film’s beginning helpfully informs the audience that, in Elizabethan England, “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were merely variant spellings of the same name). An insult, perhaps. She certainly thinks so when she loudly protests from within the crowd of groundlings that the actors have dared to utter Hamnet’s name aloud. But then, on the stage, Agnes sees her son again. Hamlet, played by Noah Jube (the real-life brother of Jacobi Jupe), stands proudly onstage with bleached hair, looking far too much like her son. She hears a mixture of her words and her husband’s in the dialogue. The film implies that this may be the first time Agnes has ever seen one of Will’s plays staged by his company. And in the play’s finale, in which Hamlet dies by poisoning at the hands of Laertes, Agnes is surrounded by a mournful, teary audience who extend their hands out to Hamlet on stage. Here, for the first time in what could be years, she laughs.
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| Image via Focus Features. |
In the play’s most famous soliloquy, Hamlet asks the question of whether it is better for him to live or to die. “To be, or not to be.” To live, or not to live. While the play and the film offer hardly any answers as to the crushing weight of living and the sweet temptation of death, something which appears central to the internal conflict within Agnes, in this profoundly beautiful moment, she is given a piece of catharsis, something Aristotle would mark as the end goal of all great tragedy. Hamnet is a film that picks at an exposed nerve, making it one of the most emotionally devastating — and then eventually liberating — theatre experiences I’ve had in a long time. Whether or not you will see Hamnet as more than just weepy and emotionally manipulative will depend on your mileage with the story and, for the more cynical MA and PhDs in English among us, if you can accept the inherent fiction of the text. Did anything remotely similar to this film happen in real life? It’s impossible to say. But this new, deeply humanizing story transcends the need for a biopic about Anne and William Shakespeare. Instead, reinterpreted Agnes and Will make creation a painful and beautiful process that is caught between myth and earthly reality, the weary living and the immortal dead.
Hamnet is now playing in theatres.
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