LFF Review: ‘Hamnet’
There are films that move you, and then there are films that seem to reach inside your chest, rearrange something and leave you to figure out how to put it back together afterwards. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet is the latter, a staggering, profoundly moving exploration of love, grief and the strange, almost inexplicable ways we attempt to survive the people we lose.
Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel, Hamnet imagines the family life of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley), tracing their relationship from its earliest, most intoxicating days through marriage, parenthood and an unimaginable loss that would ultimately become intertwined with the creation of Hamlet. Zhao co-wrote the screenplay with O’Farrell, taking a story rooted in one of history’s most famous names and making it feel startlingly intimate.
That intimacy is crucial because Hamnet is not particularly interested in Shakespeare the icon. For large stretches of the film, he is simply Will: a husband, a father, a man desperate to create something of his own while increasingly aware of everything that creation asks him to leave behind. Mescal has always been particularly gifted at playing men who struggle to verbalize the enormity of what they are feeling, but Hamnet gives him perhaps the most complicated variation on that archetype yet. He delivers the most complex, nuanced performance of his career, finding contradictions within Will that a less thoughtful performance may have tried to smooth over.
There is tenderness to him, but there is selfishness too. Ambition sits alongside guilt; love alongside absence. Mescal never seems interested in making Will easy to understand, much less easy to forgive. Instead, he allows those competing emotions to exist simultaneously, communicating as much through a downturned glance or a moment of hesitation as he does through dialogue. When grief finally takes hold of him, it does not arrive in the way we expect. Mescal internalizes it until it almost seems to change the way Will occupies his own body, the weight of everything unsaid slowly becoming impossible to carry. It is a remarkably controlled performance, made all the more devastating by the moments in which that control finally begins to fracture.
And yet, as extraordinary as Mescal is, Hamnet belongs to Jessie Buckley. Buckley is ethereal as Agnes, but describing the performance that way almost feels insufficient. There is something elemental about what she does here. Agnes seems completely connected to the natural world around her, moving through forests and fields with an instinctive understanding of life that initially makes her appear almost otherworldly. Buckley never allows that quality to distance us from her, though. If anything, it makes what follows even more painful. She is ferocious, playful, sensual, strange, warm and eventually so completely consumed by grief that watching her becomes almost unbearable.
It is the kind of performance that seems to bypass technique altogether. You stop seeing the choices behind it. You stop seeing an actor. Buckley’s pain feels frighteningly immediate, particularly in the film’s most emotionally devastating passages, where Zhao simply allows her camera to stay with Agnes rather than cutting away from the ugliness of what she is experiencing. There is no attempt to make grief beautiful or palatable. Buckley howls, collapses, lashes out and retreats into herself. She makes loss feel physical.
That honesty extends to Zhao’s direction, which is nothing short of impeccable. There would have been a much safer, more conventional version of Hamnet, an ornate prestige drama reverentially recreating Shakespearean England while telegraphing its importance at every possible opportunity. Zhao has made something far more alive. Working with cinematographer Łukasz Żal, production designer Fiona Crombie and composer Max Richter, she creates a world that feels tactile rather than preserved behind glass.
The camera moves through homes, forests and bodies with remarkable freedom, sometimes observing from a distance and elsewhere getting so close that it feels almost invasive. Zhao has always had an extraordinary sensitivity toward landscapes and the people who exist within them, but here she turns that instinct inward. Nature is not merely something beautiful surrounding the characters; it becomes part of their emotional language. Birth, death, decay and renewal are constantly circling one another, until the boundary between the physical and spiritual begins to feel increasingly thin.
And then there is the film’s final movement. Without giving away how Zhao chooses to bring everything together, the last stretch of Hamnet is among the most overwhelming pieces of filmmaking in recent memory. Everything the film has been quietly accumulating suddenly finds an outlet: the anger, guilt, love and unbearable absence that neither Agnes nor Will has been capable of articulating. Art becomes a language for something language itself has failed to contain.
It would have been incredibly easy for that idea to become sentimental. In Zhao’s hands, it becomes transcendent. Perhaps that is what makes Hamnet so difficult to shake. It understands that art cannot bring someone back. It cannot erase grief, undo regret or return a family to what it once was. But it can give shape to something otherwise shapeless. It can take private pain and, somehow, allow a room full of strangers to recognize themselves within it.
Hamnet is a towering achievement from Zhao, at once enormous in feeling and remarkably intimate in execution. Mescal has never been better, Buckley is simply extraordinary, and together they give the film a beating, bruised heart that refuses to let go. By the time the credits begin to roll, it feels less like you have watched a movie than lived through something alongside its characters. It is an experience that will stay with you far after the credits roll.
Rating: 5/5
Hamnet screened at the 2025 BFI London Film Festival.
Ahmad W.
Aspiring critic and poster designer.