This is a film about what it means to have children and the pulverising consequences that come from potentially losing them before they have had time to thrive. In terms of emotional trigger points and failsafe methods to make a cinema audience sob, the premature death of a child is equivalent to holding four aces – a surefire victory on those dark terms. In her new film Hamnet, the filmmaker Chloé Zhao does not soft-pedal the realities of dealing with infant mortality, though nor does she lean on maudlin sentiment or shy away from the fact that the darkest moments in life call for radical strategies when it comes to the necessity of comprehending the chore of existence.
The film is adapted from the 2020 historical fiction novel by Maggie O’Farrell, and tells of the domestic and professional travails of Agnes (Jessie Buckley) and William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal). The title of the film is not a misprint, but refers to the name of the pair’s preteen son (sensitively played by Jacobi Jupe), who expired from illness in the late-1500s and who became a source of inspiration – the film speculates – for Shakespeare’s tortured opus. Zhao and O’Farrell’s adaptation of the source avoids the pitfalls of literary fawning and darlings are killed when it comes to processing the essence of the story and making it visual and ethereal rather than CMD‑C, CMD-Ving the dialogue from the page and dumping it in the screenplay. Sonically and atmospherically, it’s very in keeping with Zhao’s pastoral vision of the world, and she never allows herself to get bogged down in the stereotypes of historical re-enactment or going too hard and heavy on production design.
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Characters are framed against backdrops of lush flora and fauna and, in the instance of Agnes, she is introduced emerging from the hollow of a giant tree like some kind of wood nymph. Initially, she does not seem like a natural fit for the more studious and neurotic William, the failson progeny of a countryside glovemaker, but their courtship is presented as a nimble dance and their eventual bond wholly unshatterable. Mescal is hugely impressive as the skittish young bard whose rhetorical requests to pop off and go to work in London cause great spikes in dramatic tension. Buckley, meanwhile, delivers perhaps her most lucid and devastating performance to date as the more earthy and maternal Agnes, wrestling with divine contradictions, suffering through multiple birthing scenes and, in doing so, cementing her status as one of the great screen actors of the 21st century.
While there’s definitely an anatomical study of heterosexual relationships here that sings with a modern resonance, the film’s coup de grâce frames art itself as an arcane source of mental wellbeing. It’s a given that the process of making art comes with natural therapeutic qualities, and that consuming art can also leaven spirits and build a measure of understanding in worldly woes. Yet in Hamnet, art is presented as a two-way whisper, as a codeword for connectivity and as a way to unlock doors to the future, and living.