I went into Hamnet cold, aware from the awards-circuit rumors that I could expect a lot of crying, but knowing little else. When I showed up for a screening at the Toronto International Film Festival at 8 in the morning, surrounded by exhausted festival-goers who were running on caffeine, fumes, and a steady diet of 5 films a day, I half expected I’d struggle to stay awake.
So I was pleasantly surprised that while Hamnet had all of the trappings of a period-piece, dramatic Oscar bait film, it was a different experience than I imagined. Hamnet is handsomely filmed, scored, and directed. It’s chock-full of high-caliber acting performances. All of this I anticipated: what I did not expect is the unflinchingly secular view of life and death Hamnet provides, and how it manages to filter that view through an uplifting lens.
Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 historical fiction novel of the same name, Hamnet stars Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal as Agnes and William Shakespeare. The film chronicles their courtship, including Agnes’ “witchy” tendencies and the way she gravitates towards nature, while William finds himself pulled to cities, fellowship, and art. When the couple loses a child at a young age due to an illness, they each pull more inwards to their base tendencies and struggle to understand how to navigate the loss jointly.
Although Hamnet centers around the way a real-life tragedy may have influenced William Shakespeare’s work, it doesn’t have a lot to say about Shakespeare as an individual. Those seeking that might be let down: it’s far more concerned with his work and process of creation. Agnes is the most anchored character in Hamnet, and Buckley is rightfully going to run up the leaderboard with awards for her performance here. She is put through the emotional wringer, particularly in the film’s second act, but manages to move convincingly between the biggest and loudest of moments to softer and gentler ones.
Still, I found myself surprised that the more emotionally affecting moments came through William’s point of view in the final act. Part of this is the influence of word-of-mouth – if you’ve heard anything about Hamnet, it’s probably hyperbolic descriptions of how hard and loud someone sobbed when they saw it. So throughout Buckley’s performance in the second act, I felt myself affected but somewhat at a remove, watching others around me openly weep while I remained composed.
The film’s third act, though, did manage to reduce me to tears. At first it felt like the purpose of the third act was to simply provide an origin story for everything about Hamlet, but I’d argue this isn’t the film’s intention at all. Instead, it asks the viewer to examine the art they love and see it as a distillation of hundreds of memories, feelings, and thoughts – how something that appears simple on the surface has a network of roots beneath it. In the case of Hamnet, that distillation is how William copes with the grief of his child. Mescal’s performance here is restrained and understated, a perhaps necessary counterpart in tone to Buckley’s performance, but it cut me the deepest. (My only quip with this cathartic third act was the use of a Max Richter song that has been heavily used elsewhere – but this is unlikely to bother most people.)
As someone who is not religious, it’s easiest to understand the benefits of faith in times of grief and hardship. When we lose someone close to us, we can lean on the idea that we are grateful for the time we did have with them. But when a child’s life is cut short so young, that kind of rhetoric doesn’t suffice. Religion here offers something that the secular world does not – a sense of reason and the promise of more.
Zhao’s take on Hamnet is one of the best cinematic interpretations of how art can offer a sense of immortality, catharsis, and community, much like faith. It’s a vision of grief that doesn’t require belief in anything beyond this world – only belief in what we can make from what we’ve lost.