Hamnet

HAMNET   **

Chloé Zhao

2025

IDEA:  A family tragedy rends the domestic peace of Shakespeare and his wife Agnes, spurring the former to write one of his greatest works.

BLURB:  Hamnet is based on a fundamentally shaky foundation: that the death of Shakespeare’s son directly inspired the creation of the Bard’s play “Hamlet.” This isn’t just speculative and schematic, but, in the hands of O’Farrell and Zhao, a premise that doesn’t translate to particularly compelling or illuminating drama. Worse, it’s ethically dubious, using a child’s death as a plot device for the unlocking of adult creativity and meaning, and as a presumptuous request for the audience’s tears. With leaden solemnity, O’Farrell and Zhao portend the boy’s death long before he’s born, making Hamnet a protracted waiting game. The overall aesthetic follows somber suit, with Łukasz Żal’s ill-fitting digital cinematography casting everything in a muted sheen to match the tonal monotony. Thank goodness for Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, who bring a pulse to Zhao’s airless filmmaking in performances that suggest the humanity of characters largely reduced to symbols of stoic maternal suffering and male-ego creative genius, respectively. Their emotional vulnerability occasionally cuts through and charges the film’s stodgy self-seriousness, whether it’s Buckley’s churning, memorably silent wail of grief or Mescal’s mix of melancholy and pride as he watches his play come to life from behind the stage. Yet their tears and gesticulations alone — nor a finale that strains effortfully for pathos — are enough to stir an audience that’s given insufficient feeling for their (and little Hamnet’s) inner lives.