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Hamnet movie review: An absence permeates Hamnet. In the forests from where Agnes (Buckley) comes and keeps returning to for sustenance, there is a hollow that draws her. The houses are bare and desolate, and wild, the village of Stratford empty. Even London is dreary and dark, haunted by a pestilence.
As far as establishing the grief that underpins this story – which is an imaginative retelling of William Shakespeare and how he came to write Hamlet, based on the best-selling novel also called Hamnet – Zhao is very good. With Hamnet’s author Maggie O’Farrell as co-screenwriter, Zhao cuts away the trimmings to get more or less right to the point.
It serves her film well, centred as it is on the most powerful passage of the novel. The drawback is that, with their backstories reduced to a minimum, you get little sense of who Agnes and Will are as people.
Agnes is explained away as “the daughter of a forest witch”, her sensory powers and her strength the shallower for not being fully explored. The blow when grief fells that power and strength, leaving Agnes raw and unseeing, is hence not as keenly felt.
Will (Mescal) is even less fleshed out, his desire to explore worlds away from the shackles of his Stratford village seeming more a factor of a quick marriage and a double-quick first child. He bangs a table in frustration once, scattering the notes he has been scribbling on and waking up the baby – this urge to write coming out of seemingly nowhere.
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However, once the couple have settled into the more humdrum rhythm of marriage, with three children behind them – Susanna (Breathnach) the eldest, and twins Hamnet (Jupe) and Judith (Lynes) – the film is on surer ground. There is genuine love in the family the couple build together, the scenes of play at home and in the forest between them preparing the ground for the loss that we know will follow.
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There is tenderness about bidding farewell to Agnes’s pet kite, a gesture that will resonate powerfully later. Even a smaller goodbye ritual that Will and Hamnet have, as he leaves for London – “again” – will break your heart against the realisation that it is their last.
The talented Buckley fills the vast canvas she is given to inhabit. From the otherworlds to which Agnes is believed to belong, to the very real worlds of pain and love and anger she inhabits, Buckley gives the kind of performance the Academy is partial to – her silent scream alone, as she holds the inert body of son Hamnet, would have been enough.
Against this powerhouse show, Mescal’s Will is easy to ignore. And it is true that it takes him harder to make his presence felt. But eventually Mescal catches up strongly to his fellow Irish actor Buckley.
However, just as it is a leap to join Hamnet to Hamlet – comforting as it may be to give our favourite artistes a human story – Zhao, who is vying for her second Best Director Oscar after Nomadland, appears to be jumping through the hoops to land a grander narrative. There is a persistence to impress, to look deeper, to linger longer, to cry more… to stretch.
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To paraphrase Shakespeare, lesser sound and fury often signify more.
Hamnet movie director: Chloé Zhao
Hamnet movie cast: Jesse Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, Jacobi Jupe, Olivia Lynes, Bodhi Rae Breathnach
Hamnet movie rating: 3.5 stars
English (US) ·