Hamnet
Chloé Zhao transforms Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel into an intimate and enormously moving thing of beauty.
The play’s the thing: Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley and Bodhi Rae Breathnach
Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Hamnet is about so many things that one might think it impossible to condense it all into just two hours of screen time. The title may be short, but the breadth of subject matter is wide-ranging: superstition, herbalism, domestic abuse, clairvoyance, sex, childbirth, marriage, domestic duty, work, grief and the regenerative power of great theatre. And the director Chloé Zhao shoehorns the ingredients of Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel into a deceptively simple chamber piece.
Chloé Zhao is only the second female director in history to win an Oscar, for the American road movie Nomadland (2020). Before that she directed The Rider (2017), a contemporary Western steeped in the mythos of American masculinity, and next, in 2021, she brought us the deeply underrated superhero movie Eternals. Switching to a quintessentially English period drama would, perhaps, just seem par for the course. With Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes on board as producers, Zhao has fashioned a profoundly visual, intimate work, adapted in collaboration with the original author, Maggie O’Farrell. Jettisoning the dual time lines of the novel, Zhao has opted for a linear narrative, replacing the elegant prose of O’Farrell with scenes of elegiac atmosphere.
Perhaps it goes without saying that with these talents at hand, the production values are second-to-none, from the evocative sound design and painterly interiors to the period detail and superlative cinematography capturing the sylvan countryside surrounding Stratford. And holding it all together are the performances of Jessie Buckley as the wise and feral Agnes and Paul Mescal as the young Latin tutor who falls under her spell. Buckley just gets better and better, here instilling Agnes with a great stillness and mystery, while her Irish compatriot Paul Mescal provides a haunting sincerity and creative frustration with the writer’s domestically stifling circumstances. And the young actors who play the children who come to share the couple’s home are wonderful, too, namely Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Olivia Lynes and Jacobi Jupe. And here’s a coup: the 12-year-old Jacobi Jupe plays Hamnet, the couple’s only son, while Jacobi’s older brother Noah Jupe plays Hamlet. That has to be more than serendipity.
For those who don’t know, the name Hamnet was interchangeable with Hamlet in the late sixteenth century, whereby hangs a tale. And Hamnet’s father was a teacher who found a more profitable calling in the playhouses of London in the 1500s, writing (and performing) for the great unwashed. But the writer’s wife, Agnes, who was borne of the forest and insisted on having her first child birthed there, did not understand the trivial profession of the father of her children. With her gift for prophecy and ability to heal the sick, what time had she for the japery of popular entertainment? And behind every great man…
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, Jacobi Jupe, Olivia Lynes, Justine Mitchell, David Wilmot, Louisa Harland, Freya Hannan-Mills, Noah Jupe.
Dir Chloé Zhao, Pro Steven Spielberg, Sam Mendes, Liza Marshall, Pippa Harris and Nicolas Gonda, Screenplay Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, from the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, Ph Łukasz Żal, Pro Des Fiona Crombie, Ed Affonso Gonçalves and Chloé Zhao, Music Max Richter, Costumes Malgosia Turzanska, Sound Johnnie Burn, Maximilian Behrens and Brendan Feeney, Dialect coach Sandra Butterworth.
Hera Pictures/Neal Street Productions/Amblin Entertainment/Book of Shadows/Amblin Partners-Universal Pictures.
125 mins. UK/USA. 2025. US Rel: 5 December 2025. UK Rel: 9 January 2026. Cert. 12A.
