‘Hamnet’ movie review: Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in a towering song of sorrow

However much one wishes to separate the dancer from the dance, there is always the desire to learn what went into the making of a classic be it a novel, a play, a song or a painting. Working out the precise catalyst for a transcendent work of art makes us feel genius adjacent.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which has been interpreted a million ways from Sunday, is a great favourite of scholars and academics, apart from rock stars, poets, psychologists and filmmakers. The fact that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet four years after the death of his only son, Hamnet, has been a thread pulled on by many theorists.

“Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name” Maggie O’Farrell quotes Steven Greenblatt in the beginning of her 2020 historical novel, Hamnet, which focuses on the personal, telling the story from the perspective of Shakespeare’s wife as the writer’s success in London plays out in the background.

By calling her Agnes, O’Farrell has reclaimed her from the traditional view of an older, dull Anne Hathaway, whom Shakespeare ran away from at the first chance he got.  

A still from the film
| Photo Credit:
Focus Features

Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Hamnet with a screenplay written by Zhao and O’Farrell has done away with two personal annoyances of the book. The linear storytelling removes the tedious back and forth and even though Shakespeare is not referred to by name till practically the end of the movie, it does not feel as clunky as it did in the book. While it probably works the first few times in the book, the non-naming quickly becomes tiring.

The movie tells the story of Agnes (Jessie Buckley), who knows the ways of the forest, and William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal). The two fall in love, get married and have three children—Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and twins, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes).

Realising Stratford is too small to contain her husband’s imagination, Agnes gets her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) to convince Shakespeare’s abusive father, John (David Wilmot) to let him go to London to expand the family’s gloving business. Years pass and Shakespeare is successful on the London stage coming home whenever he can.

A still from the film
| Photo Credit:
Focus Features

Judith contracts the plague and even as Agnes nurses her to health, Hamnet succumbs. Agnes and Shakespeare react to their bereavement in different ways. Shakespeare returns almost immediately to London much to Agnes’ fury. She only understands while watching the performance of Hamlet that her husband processed his grief in the only way he could.

While Shakespeare in Love had the jewelled excess of the Elizabethan Age (or a version of it), Hamnet focuses on the ordinary, the day-to-day lives of regular people, before they became bowed down by 400 years of study and worship.

Zhao steers this emotional supernova with graceful restraint. The production design creates a beautiful countryside to contrast with the grey hurly burly of London. The background score uses silence and ambient sound to illuminate the spaces between grief and understanding.

Buckley is the whirling dervish propelling the film, at once fierce and fragile, wise, warm and playful. Mescal is the perfect foil as the doting father, the loving husband and the incandescent artist. Emily Watson weighs in with her considerable talent as Shakespeare’s mother, Mary.

Like the book, the film ends with a performance of Hamlet. Though the children recited the witches’ lines from Macbeth (the play was performed some years after Hamlet, but the lines must have been brewing in Shakespeare’s mind before) the chance to hear the iconic Nunnery Speech and of course, “To be or Not to be” is jolly good.

Hamnet is not an easy watch, not even a necessary one, but if you are the kind of person who sleeps perchance to dream on the mystery and mundaneness of genius, Hamnet could whisper an answer.   

Hamnet is currently running in theatres

Published – February 28, 2026 11:44 am IST