From Academy Award® winning writer/director Chloé Zhao, Hamnet is a towering achievement. It’s a deeply felt, human story about coping with loss and love persevering despite being scarred by the unimaginable. It’s also a profound statement about the power of art to connect people and express what couldn’t be communicated otherwise. Its multiple levels are conveyed by intelligent, sensitive direction and indelible performances as it presents a new way to look at one of the best-known plays of all time, refracted through the lens of the life of its writer, William Shakespeare, and, especially, his wife Agnes.

Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s lauded 2020 novel – a dense and lyrical imagining of the lives of William Shakespeare’s family – full of interior thought and lush descriptions of the physical world – Hamnet, invents many facets of Shakespeare’s history.  It dreams up the courtship of young William (a moving Paul Mescal), then a Latin tutor, and slightly older Agnes Hathaway (an unforgettable Jessie Buckley), an oddball loner about whom the villagers whisper in fearful tones. William is drawn to exactly that strangeness, the individuality that will come to inform so much of the family’s domestic routine. 

Hamnet was, records tell us, Shakespeare’s son, who died at a young age and is thought to have inspired, at the very least, the title of Hamlet, the story of a young prince who meets a tragic end. What O’Farrell and now Zhao imagine is that the writing of Hamlet was an exercise in grieving, a way for Shakespeare to honor his son and bid him adieu.  Breaking hearts and mending them in one fell swoop, Hamnet speculates on the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s masterpiece with palpable emotional force thanks to Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal’s astonishing performances.