Laurence Olivier, who knew a thing or two about Shakespeare, talked long ago about a famous scream he delivered, while apparently tearing out his own eyes, in a 1946 production of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex.
He thought of animals in traps. “In the Arctic they put down salt and the ermine comes to lick it,” he said. “And his tongue freezes to the ice. I thought about that when I screamed as Oedipus.”
There is a suggestion of that in the wail Jessie Buckley, playing Agnes Shakespeare, gives as the character absorbs her son’s death in Chloé Zhao’s devastating adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague.
There is much else to admire in this beautifully shot, cruelly raw film, but, with some justification, most of the talk will be about the female lead. One can think of few other actors who can so unashamedly access such torrents of simulated emotion. But technique is always in control. It is among the marvels here that Buckley gives so much without giving too much.
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Before we get there, we have a pastoral meet-cute between Paul Mescal’s William Shakespeare, then a struggling Latin tutor, and the instinctive earth spirit this project imagines Agnes Hathaway (elsewhere, often Anne Hathaway) to have been. We first see her coiled up beneath a tree as a fox might rest following a successful hunt.
Zhao, who wrote the script with O’Farrell, is inviting a leap that may ask too much of more cynical viewers. Agnes, at home to summoning hawks from clean air, is connected to the woods by a primal feminine impulse that reaches back to ancient witches and then forward through the songs of Sandy Denny and the women of cinematic folk horror. The Polish cinematographer Lukasz Zal, Oscar-nominated for Ida and Cold War, allows the Welsh locations to soak their lacustrine dampness through every inviting frame.
Will, who will spend much of the film in smelly London, is more a figure of early modernity: practical, contained, undemonstrative. One can hardly imagine better casting than Mescal. The two are East Midlands yin and yang. Buckley’s face has a muscular dexterity that can practically turn itself upside down. Mescal’s steadiness, at its best, asks more questions than it answers.
The couple’s families are not happy with the union, but the two marry, nonetheless, and Agnes gives birth first to Susanna and then to twins, Judith and Hamnet. As Will tastes success in the English capital, the bubonic plague – O’Farrell’s admired novel was, appropriately, published in the pandemic year – oozes its way towards Stratford and eventually gathers poor Hamnet to the fathers.
The closing third is where the film really ratchets its emotional grip, but it is also where a few conspicuous flaws emerge. A scene in which a despairing Will speaks Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy to the Thames is hopelessly on the nose, akin to the hero of a rock biopic hearing someone speak the title of an as-yet-unwritten signature hit.
Indeed, the efforts to tie the personal tragedy in with the content of that play – “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were, a title card explains, essentially the same name – ultimately prove too much of a strain.
But the slowly alleviating tension between a racked Agnes and a Will who is often remote, both literally and figuratively, give the last half-hour an extraordinary poignancy.
Some critics have complained that we are watching little more than grief porn. Well, only in the sense that Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves was poverty porn and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver was lunatic porn.
Grief is a fit subject, and it is here treated with such intense dignity that we can even forgive yet another airing of Max Richter’s sombre tune On the Nature of Daylight. It is now as overused as once was Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel.
The ending of Hamnet remains beautifully judged. Nothing so tender can be easily dismissed or forgotten.
In cinemas from Friday, January 9th, 2026
