Hamnet ~ Review

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There’s really no other way to discuss this film without completely spoiling it, so the following will contain spoilers for Hamnet (the 2025 film), Hamlet (the play written around 1601), and the life of William Shakespeare (1564-1616). You have been warned, or should have paid better attention in English class.
 
For the first two-thirds of Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, I found myself waffling between boredom and annoyance. I found the film’s story about Will Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his marriage to Agnes (Anne) Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) to feel routine and predictable. The film walks through every biopic cliché about a tortured artist and absent father being propped up by a long-suffering wife. “Forced” doesn’t even begin to describe a scene where Shakespeare, drunk and wrestling with writer’s block, angrily slams his hand on his desk, waking up his firstborn child.
 
The picture plods along, as if the film itself is unsure about how to tell this story, so it resorts to cliches. It’s all well-acted, Lukasz Zal’s cinematography is beautiful, and the score by Max Richter is sumptuous. But the film felt overly familiar, reminding me of The Whole Wide World, a similar biopic about the woman in a tortured author’s life. And while Shakespeare may have been a tortured artist and absent father in real life, it just doesn’t make for compelling drama in 2025.
 
So, I was deeply annoyed and felt like the movie was wasting my time with misery porn for AP Lit teachers. But as the film moved into its climax, the filmmaking felt more confident, the story, more assured, and the film completely destroyed me on an emotional level.
 
Hamnet follows the marriage of Agnes and William Shakespeare, through their courtship and the death of their son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) at the age of 11. Will is a tortured artist type who has a way with words, but no real outlet, so Agnes sends him off to London to make something of himself. From there, the film mostly follows Agnes, living in Stratford, as she makes a home with three kids, while Shakespeare writes and performs plays in London. This relatively peaceful existence is shattered when Hamnet dies from the plague, and the Shakespeare family must now rebuild from their grief.
 
I mentioned confidence before, and through most of Hamnet it felt like the script by Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell (based on her book) just didn’t have the confidence to tell this story without the reliance on cliché a scene where Shakespeare contemplates suicide and recites the “To be, or not to Be” speech was a bit too on the nose for me. But then the story shifts into its climax, which is a performance of the climax of Hamlet. And the film knocks it out of the park with a grand slam of acting, direction, and cinematography. It’s a sequence where Hamlet dies on stage, and you watch Jessie Buckley move through every stage of grief in real time. It’s quietly devastating and achingly sincere. It’s tragedy and catharsis rolled into one. It’s about the cosmic power of art to change our emotions. Where was this in the preceding 90 minutes?
 
Acting across the board is great. Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare as a man stewing with emotions, but unable to articulate them. I wish the film had given just a little bit more lip service to the fact that Shakespeare wrote a lot of comedies, but the movie’s not really about him, so I guess we can forgive it.
 
The real standouts, however, are Jessie Buckley and Jacobi Jupe. Buckley carries the movie, and her magnetic performance held my attention even when the film started to bore me. As mentioned, the climax of the film is her standout moment, and it’s just a bravura sequence. Jupe has a thankless role, in that the character basically exists in this story to die, but he gives Hamnet a real interiority that, I think, would have been lost with a lesser actor. I expect Jupe to become a household name in the near future.
 
Hamnet eventually won me over. I just wish the confidence of the ending was part of the beginning.
 
Two and a half out of four stars