Hamnet, 2025.
Directed by Chloe Zhao.
Starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, and Joe Alwyn.
SYNOPSIS:
A story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet.
Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet arrives with ideal credentials: a celebrated source text, the backing of Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures, and a cast led by hot young Oscar-nominated stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. On paper, it has all the makings of prestige cinema. In practice, it is a film of frustrating craft and a weak pulse.
Zhao stages her Elizabethan world broadly, with a big canvas but almost no warmth. Stratford is depicted as a dim, joyless place, a house that never once feels like a home. Naturally lit mostly in overcast; sunlight is seen only in fleeting moments when William Shakespeare (Mescal) is writing or briefly playing with his children. The production design is grand in scale but deliberately sparse, dominated by earth tones and next to no set dressing. The scenes that do bring enough light and life to them, like the initial meet-cute, a memorable birthing scene and the stage at the Globe Theatre, are few and far between its meandering two-hour run time. In short, the film is an absolute snoozefest.
The scene where a fragment of Hamlet is performed before an awed crowd momentarily stirs the film to life as the actor playing Hamlet (Noah Jupe in a scene-stealing performance) reaches down from the stage toward his audience as if they are a part of the earth. The earth, surprisingly, reaches back.
Yet the beautiful moment is undercut by an overly familiar cue: composer Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” which was already put to perfect use in the Academy Award-winning film Arrival, less than a decade ago, along with countless other projects. Its use is emblematic of the film’s larger problem — a reliance on obvious, borrowed emotional signifiers rather than capably earning its own. The result is a film that often tells you how to feel while making you feel it.
Mescal, an actor who has built a niche playing melancholy young men (Normal People, Aftersun), steps into the larger-than-life role of Shakespeare as a very distant, passionate and anguished figure. It’s a less mythic, more human interpretation that still doesn’t feel like a real character. Buckley, fiery yet ethereal, commands most of the screen time as Agnes and is given a lot of big scenes that qualify as Oscar bait. In previous roles (I’m Thinking of Ending Things, The Lost Daughter), Buckley has greatly excelled at doing more with less, but this film, frustratingly, does not give her that chance.
Together, the two actors share surprisingly few scenes. Their relationship is framed in broad strokes: a rush of physical passion, the birth of his child rendered with mythic flourish, and then long, silent separations as he vanishes to London and she mourns alone. Agnes’s reputation in their local village is “witchy,” but the film hesitates to completely embrace the magical realism that could have concretely given the story a more alive and less-boring texture.
Throughout, Zhao’s direction favours symbolism while her writing favours literalism. Dialogue frequently spells out emotions that performances and visuals convey on their own. The script, co-written by Zhao and O’Farrell, feels cautious and over-determined — more concerned with clarity than vitality. A moving image of water rushing underneath the door of Agnes’ house as her water breaks, is met with her mother-in-law explaining she cannot go out because of the storm. The filmmakers fear that audiences might miss the symbolism in Hamnet or worse misinterpret its message. Call it a sign of the times.
Despite its technical ambition and production value, Hamnet rarely breathes. It feels designed more to be admired than experienced: a prestige period piece assembled from solemn tones, dim compositions, and unmistakable awards ambition. The brilliance of Shakespeare’s writing lies in his ability to make the universal feel alive and immediate. This film, far too often, feels insecure, explaining its ideas without unconditionally allowing that love to be shared with its audience.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Will Hume
