Talking about the collective healing power of cinema can sometimes feel cliché, perhaps even hollow, especially when it comes to major Hollywood studio movies. Don’t get me wrong — I will always be an advocate for film and the importance of storytelling in general. However, in these cultural and economic times — between the soaring prices of movie tickets, the inexplicable decline in theatre etiquette, and the slew of slop Hollywood has, more often than not, churned out these last few years — it feels increasingly futile to champion the theatre-going experience as one that inspires community, empathy, and togetherness.
But if there’s one film recently that has reminded me of why we go to the movies — indeed, why I persist in writing about film — it’s Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet.
Based on the novel of the same name by Maggie O’Farrell (who splits screenwriting duties here with Zhao), Hamnet is a dramatic retelling of the marriage between Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) and William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal). It juxtaposes the romance of their courtship with their struggle to build a life and family together while Shakespeare pursues his art. Most importantly, the film dives into the untimely death of their young son, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), and how tragedy inspired one of the most prolific plays in English history.
Hamnet takes root at the intersection between life and art, love and loss, and creation and death. Zhao presents Agnes as a human extension of nature itself, thriving more in the muddy earth of the forest than within the walls of her small village (and the rules and religion that come with it). She’s a stark contrast to William, whose purpose and pursuits are more internally and artistically driven (he spends the majority of his time off-screen in London, building the career and legacy we know today). And yet, the two fit together, William being drawn to Agnes’ mystical approach to the world around her.
In fact, Zhao keeps our focus on Agnes, who builds her own sort of legacy in motherhood, passing down her mother’s connection to, knowledge of, and respect for nature to her own children, eldest daughter Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and twins Hamnet and Judith (Olivia Lynes). Łukasz Żal’s cinematography here is integral, soft and sweeping as it shows us shades of England’s natural world that feel unchartered and, indeed, border on the supernatural.
Buckley is sublime as Agnes, moving through each scene with a kind of otherworldly energy. When tragedy strikes, her performance leans almost feral in how she navigates unimaginable pain. Mescal and Jupe, too, are equally great to watch as the Shakespeare father and son, their love for Agnes providing an undercurrent of warmth in this dark tale.
In Hamnet’s final act, Zhao takes us to London, specifically Shakespeare’s Globe, and thus into a world of art and artifice. It’s a foreign setting for Agnes, who joins the London crowd for the premiere performance of Hamlet. Frustrated that her husband has invoked their dead son’s name for a public that did not know him, she is determined to despise the event.
Here, Zhao takes a page from Shakespeare’s book, putting on a play within a play. It could have easily felt hammed-up, á la Shakespeare in Love, but Zhao takes a sensitive yet intentional approach, presenting Agnes’ experience almost like a discovery. Hamlet, after all, bears no real relation to her son other than in name, but the themes clearly resonate with her. By the end, the play transforms and transcends, and as Agnes looks at how moved the crowd is, she no longer feels isolated in her grief.
That is the power Hamnet — and, by extension, art itself — holds. It is the hand that reaches across the stage and the screen and latches onto your soul, effectively reminding you that, though times can get dark and life no longer worth living, you are never alone.
