Shakespearean is as Shakespearean does in the lovely puzzler of a film that is Hamnet. Few films in history — if any — have managed the inspired director and co-writer Chloé Zhao’s deft feat of connecting revisionist history, shards of Shakespearean lore, forest-y mysticism, and family life pathos, bringing Maggie O’Farrell’s famed novel to the screen with a powerfully cinematic fluidity. (O’Farrell co-wrote the screenplay with Zhao.)
Oscar-winning director Zhao pulls us so deeply and empathetically into the story and these unfolding lives — and with the uncanny mix of polish and loose-fit naturalism of her 2020 sensation Nomadland — that suspension of disbelief comes easily and swiftly and stays through to the emotionally engulfed finale in the Globe Theatre, circa the early 17th century. Reality checking comes later, and is at least partly beside the point of this enchanting storytelling exercise.
What little we know to be true of Shakespeare’s life includes the existence, and the early plague-caused death, of his young son Hamnet. Therein lies the center point from which plot lines and detours revolve, culminating in the premiere of the Bard’s masterpiece Hamlet, a heady response to parental grief.
Whereas other accounts of this semi-apocryphal account would elevate the iconic superstar Shakespeare (here played by Paul Mescal) into the primary spotlight, the real protagonist here is Hamnet’s suffering mother (and enchanted “child of a forest witch”) Agnes (played with a stunning, Oscar-baiting intensity by Jessie Buckley). With falcon on arm, she meets the budding Bard in her humble village, where he taught Latin. Love blossoms and three children make a mostly happy family, apart from the absenteeism of the father, busy building his life in the theater away in London.
Among the memorable and intense scenes along the narrative path are a difficult birth scene, fulfilling a prophecy, and Shakespeare’s recitation (rehearsal) of the “to be or not to be” speech in the “nunnery scene,” on a precipice, implying suicidal thoughts. Hamnet is gone, but never forgotten.
Various elements in the film, linked with Zhao’s assured sight-sound instincts at the helm, beg for kudos. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal, also the eye behind the creepily masterful Zone of Interest, manages to walk the fine and rough line between rustic naturalism and elegant blocking on the visual front. Noted and refreshingly atypical film composer Max Richter’s tasteful score provides an ideal sonic coating for the film, through to the hypnotic repeating four-measure melodic figure over the Hamlet climax and “slings and arrows” soliloquy.
Zhao readily handles the challenges of creating a compelling period piece atmosphere with tinges of the supernatural, all while tending the fires of empathy for this family’s agony over a lost child. This child’s name and the legendary theatrical byproduct of Hamnet’s death lend him a mythic status, in the book, film, and in literary history, but a more general focus of Zhao’s humanistic film reflects on more universal truths. Never mind Shakespeare. Every child is the stuff of legend.
Hamnet is currently playing at the Hitchcock Cinema. View trailer here.
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