Zhao's first three features were steeped in documentary realism, shot with a strong, windy lyricism, and replete with non-professional actors. Then came her fourth feature, the lumbering Marvel comics epic The Eternals (2021), a noble but self-evident failure in which she channeled the visual and spiritual dreams of longtime influence Terrence Malick in a futile attempt to transcend the conventions of superhero cinema. Hamnet is an inevitable improvement, although not quite a return to form. This marks Zhao's new, unstable style, interweaving muted pastoral realism and strong, sometimes assertive emotion. One minute the film whispers poetic sublimities into your ear, and the next it throws its prestige ambitions in your face.
The whiplash is disorienting, but, paradoxically, the characters' romantic turmoil creates its own center of gravity. You move with them as Agnes, sensing William's creative and professional frustrations, sends him to London to pursue his dreams, accelerating the couple's descent into marital discontent and parental grief. Buckley is every inch the requisite force of nature: he heaves and sweats in the storm as Agnes snatches her children into the world, and quickly moves from anguish to rage—exhausted, defeated rage—when one of those children is yanked back out of it. Buckley and Mescal, both Irish and both extremely gifted, do quieter, more subtle work elsewhere, although I can't say their theatrics miss the mark. What is Hamnet or Hamlet without ham?
O'Farrell's novel is subtitled “A Novel of Plague”. The most gripping and least typical chapter describes the outbreak in breathtaking detail, tracing the infestation from Alexandria, where a ship worker had a fateful encounter with monkey fleas, all the way to England and ultimately to the Shakespearean doorstep. It's no surprise that this isn't in the film; his focus is on the domestic claustrophobia that William avoids and Agnes sacrificially endures. Agnes finds some solace in her supportive brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) and, over time, her mother-in-law Mary (Emily Watson), who initially disapproves of Agnes but then begins to show a grudging respect rooted in a shared experience of hard work and loss. This is Zhao's first collaboration with Polish filmmaker Lukasz Žal, who in the Holocaust drama Zone of Interest (2023) used a variety of small hidden cameras to show the everyday, routine horrors of a Nazi family. “Hamnet” doesn't attempt anything as technically virtuosic or historically questionable, but it nonetheless maintains a similar atmosphere of home observation. Indoors, Shakespeares are often shot unnaturally head-on or in high-angle panoramas that diminish their stature. We could study them under glass.
This intensity of focus may also explain why Zhao and O'Farrell abandoned the novel's inconsistent narrative structure, which moves rather complexly between two parallel time frames. The film, on the other hand, moves clearly from beginning to end, abandoning any impulse toward Malikan nonlinearity. Despite this, Zhao remains under the spell of Malik the image-maker, as well as Malik the deep observer of everyday life. She has an excellent eye for sunlight, especially as it filters through the green forest canopy, and in her happiest family moments she is extremely attentive to the joyful chaos of Hamnet (Jacoby Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes) playing. At one point, the kids pretend to be the Weird Sisters. Their father may not be around much, but his work has already fascinated them.
But not Agnes. When Hamnet is away, she becomes increasingly resentful of her husband's absence. This manifests itself not in fits of rage but in a silent indifference to the work that scares William away, and we sense that Hamnet is about making a feminist corrective to the myth of the male genius. But this is a half-hearted reproach; the film ultimately pays tribute to that genius, with a compensating haste that sometimes throws Mescal's performance off-balance. During rehearsals, a distracted, frazzled playwright forces the young star (Noah Jupe) to mutilate his lines; later, walking sullenly along the Thames, William adopts Hamlet's “To be or not to be” soliloquy as his own. The play is clearly still relevant, but its appeals here seem superficial in the face of the father's grief.
Shakespeare's creation comes to life more spectacularly on stage, and Agnes witnesses it. Until now, she has avoided the Globe like the plague, and the very fact of visiting the theater seems alien to her. There's a comical aspect to her confusion—her chronic bouts of shaking get to the point where she becomes distracted—which only reveals the utterly artless depth of Buckley's immersion in the role. Not knowing Agnes encourages us to view Hamlet, staged here in a woodland setting that takes us back to the film's heavenly beginning, with fresh eyes. My own, I confess, were soon clouded with tears of such destructive power that they both quenched my skepticism and awakened it again. First is the shameless use of Max Richter's “On the Nature of Daylight”, a lush track that from Shutter Island (2010) to Arrival (2016) has aged from overuse. There is an inherent kitsch in reducing one of the richest and most intellectually prismatic works of English literature to an instrument of healing. Hamlet has been many things over the centuries; here it is mainly a vessel for parental closure. The severity of the text melts, thaws – and turns into a farewell. ♦
