Dir: Chloé Zhao
Cast: Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, David Wilmot, Jacobi Jupe, Olivia Lynes, Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Freya Hannan-Mills, Dainton Anderson, Elliot Baxter, Noah Jupe, El Simons, Louisa Harland, Jack Shalloo, Sam Woolf, Hera Gibson
Steel yourself for Chloé Zhao’s “shattering” Oscar-tipped drama about the tragedy that drove Shakespeare to write his masterpiece. From the Hamnet release date to a cast starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, check out our quickfire guide.
Our mental image of William Shakespeare has been shaped by centuries of popular culture. Perhaps you picture The Bard as the pattern-bald man of letters from the old £20 note. Or maybe you’re thinking of the Shakey impersonators outside ye olde Stratford-upon-Avon souvenir shops, flogging novelty neck-ruffs to American tourists.
There have been films made before about this rock star version of Shakespeare – to the point where the mythology has almost swallowed the man. But Chloé Zhao’s acclaimed adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet – no, that’s not a typo – is the first to present Shakespeare as a living, breathing, bleeding, grieving human being.
Maggie O’Farrell’s fictional account of Shakespeare and Hathaway’s son Hamnet – who really did exist, but died aged 11 in 1596 – won it all in 2020, from the Women's Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award For Fiction to Waterstones' Book Of The Year.
Hamnet is not strictly a true story, but Chloé Zhao’s movie certainly has grains of historical fact. The plot turns around Will and Agnes, dealing with local disapproval of their love affair and the loss of their real-life son, Hamnet. Many scholars believe the tragedy was the making of Shakespeare the playwright, igniting his great tragedy of (almost) the same name, Hamlet, first performed in 1599.
Just don’t expect a neat and tidy narrative, with Zhao’s fantastical and stylised treatment proving utterly beguiling on the big screen. “I don't think, if Will was alive, he would want a film made just as a temple to him,” Paul Mescal told Gold Derby. “I think he would want a complicated, messy version, because that's what all of his plays are.”
As Chloé Zhao told Rolling Stone, she knew at their first meeting that Mescal had the right stuff. “I thought, ‘This is somebody who can channel something for me’. Shakespeare’s work, it’s very violent, it’s very dark, it’s very masculine, for better or worse, so I wanted somebody who is not afraid to go to a place that, in today’s climate, might seem toxic or dark.”
Mescal gives a performance every bit as powerful – but from a totally different angle – to 2022’s career-best Aftersun, telling Variety he tapped into the character’s “animal quality”. Meanwhile, many critics have cited Jessie Buckley’s raw, wounded portrayal of Agnes as the most primal performance we’ve seen for years.
Hamnet isn’t especially violent, but the movie explores upsetting adult themes and the final scene is described by World Of Reel as “shattering”. The 12A rating means there’s nothing to stop emotionally mature children attending – but there are probably better options for a pre-teen birthday party.
Hamnet premiered at the 52nd Telluride Film Festival and the critics are purring. “Mescal is wonderful as the Bard, in a role that might provoke even more tears than his mourning musicologist in The History of Sound,” writes The Hollywood Reporter’s Angie Han. “But it’s Buckley who really stuns, as she evolves Agnes from the free-spirited girl of the grass to the loving wife and mother to the brittle and grieving woman.”
“Hamnet has managed to make the lines ‘goodnight, sweet prince’ somehow sting more than ever,” says Rolling Stone’s David Fear, “but it leaves you in a state of emotional bliss. Death is inevitable, the movie tells us, but art can help us make sense of the illogical notion that we’re here one second, then gone the next.”
As for Bilge Ebiri of Vulture, Hamnet is
