Denis Villeneuve must be so pissed. After his 2016 sci-fi wonder Arrival found an emotionally devastating finale while Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” brought the film to a powerful close, the instrumental piece hits like a wrecking ball in Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s tour-de-four drama about the beautiful messiness of creating art from life.
There’s a moment at the end of Hamnet when the power of collective catharsis comes full force. Zhao (Nomadland) achieves a true stroke of genius in bringing to screen this novel by Maggie O’Farrell about the inception of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as seen through the eyes of his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), while she grieves their son. In the book, Agnès sees the play and observes the Danish prince, based upon her late son Hamnet, die amid the fifth act’s copious body count. In the film, however, Buckley reaches her hand up to the actor (Noah Jupe) through whom young Hamnet seems destined to live forever.
The audience at the Globe Theatre feels her catharsis. The patrons in turn extend their hands towards the stage. There’s a pause as their hands remain suspended in the air and the crowd takes in what they’ve collectively witnessed. There’s a great doubling as the crowd onstage blurs with the crowd in the theatre. Zhao invites us to share that breath, that pause, and that release. The rest is silence, they say, save for the collective ugly cry rippling throughout any theatre screening Hamnet.
The film, adapted with O’Farrell, offers a fairly reimagining of the novel. Zhao and the author refashion the book’s non-linear structure. Where the book begins with young Hamnet dashing off for help when his twin sister, Judith, falls ill, the plague bides its time and cruelly in the film. It waits to shroud the Shakespeare household with tragedy. The film instead starts with a tale of star-crossed lovers. Young William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) tutors young pupils in Latin to pay his father’s debts. He crosses paths with his Juliet, Agnes, whose love for the forest makes her a folklorish figure in the community. Shakespeare’s family likens her more to Caliban than to Pan, but Agnes’s ethereal spirit casts a spell. Cue Shakespeare in love.
Their relationship blossoms in a story firmly rooted in the labour conditions of working class families of 1500s’ England. Instead of hot dates on balconies and whispered sweet nothings, Will travels to London for work while Agnes tends to the home. The arrival of one child, which Agnes delivers alone, writhing among the verdant forest that surrounds her property—her arms becoming ensnared in the sinewy roots of the large tree that protects her and her new-born baby—sees Hamnet create a refreshingly grounded woman whose eyes serve as the focus of this tale.
When it comes time to deliver her twins, though, Will’s stern mother Mary (Emily Watson) insists on an in-house birth. This event eerily foreshadows Hamnet’s tragedy. Agnes, see, envisions her deathbed with her children at her side. But one child plus two twins makes three. Her life becomes a mystery embedded with a sense of loss yet to materialize.
The plague comes knocking, though, in a brilliantly realized feat as Zhao reimagines the Black Death’s voyage from overseas. In London, Shakespeare takes in a shadow puppet play that ominously conveys the flea’s journey from a monkey’s back in Africa to the docks of London, England. Soon thereafter, Agnes finds herself calling upon every herb and root in nature’s arsenal—and every fibre in her being—to save Judith (Olivia Hynes) when she falls ill with plague.
It’s not quite a Sophie’s Choice scenario, but death instead comes for poor Hamnet (the impressionable Jacobi Jupe). The weight of grief consumes Hamnet as the young boy’s sudden death—a cruel twist of fate—wrecks Agnes and Shakespeare alike. Upon Hamnet’s passing, Agnes drops her strong, seemingly unshakeable composure as Buckley unleashes a guttural howl. It’s a sound one never wants to hear, like a scream that can’t quite find its breath because the mother’s had the wind knocked out of her. Life seems to disappear along with her air and voice. Grief overtakes her, while Shakespeare thrusts himself into work, leaving Agnes doubly alone in her time of need.
Buckley gives a quietly devastating performance as Agnes. For all Shakespeare’s way with words, Hamnet finds great power in silence as Agnes lets her husband occupy himself with rhymes and meters. Her performance is a masterful feat of non-verbal communication as she interacts with the environment, costumes, props, and co-stars, creating a character whose very being is an extension of the loved ones around her. It’s a beautifully lived-in performance that makes the shock of grief that overwhelms the film so powerful. While Hamnet’s body lies lifeless, Buckley conveys how the loss of a child serves as a kind of death for a parent.
Mescal, meanwhile, thoroughly challenges any idea of Shakespeare as a romantic hero. The film vastly expands the Bard’s presence in the story by tightening Hamnet’s focus. Whereas the young boy’s death quietly kills Agnes on the inside, Mescal invites the tragedy to bring the playwright more fully to life. Zhao fills Hamnet with parallels and doubling, with an earlier act of the twins switching places foreshadowing not one tragedy, but two. As Shakespeare takes the stage as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Mescal gives a performance worthy of opening night at the Globe Theatre, the words of Shakespeare’s play find renewed resonance for a generation. He trades life for his son, if only to allow him to live each time Hamlet graces the stage.
Hamnet’s passage to the afterlife, moreover, places the boy in the tragic limbo of his parents’ search for closure. Zhao imagines the young boy trapped in a backstage peril, not quite sure which door to use for his exit. It’s an extremely poignant sight to which she returns when Agnes treks to London to see her husband’s new play. Named for the boy, Agnes shakes when she sees the programme. It’s a violation, this play, seemingly forcing her to relive the death of her son again. However, as actor Noah Jupe (Jacobi’s older brother) plays Hamlet on stage, one sees the beautiful gift—and bittersweet tragedy—of Shakespeare’s creation.
Zhao makes an extremely confident transition to a more overtly stylised period work after stripped back contemporary dramas like Nomadland and The Rider. Working with cinematographer Lukas Zal (Ida), her film remains as rooted in realism as her earlier works. It’s just a different time period, but she still displays a fine eye for working class people and the daily poetry of their lived experiences. Note-perfect production design and costuming further connects the characters to the authenticity of their environments. But it’s really her ability to open up the novel that ensures Hamnet’s place among the great cinematic adaptations.
Especially impressive is the staging of Hamlet in which the words of the Danish prince’s most famous monologue will put one’s heart on one’s chest. But for all the power of the actors on stage, it’s Buckley’s shattering reaction as Agnes goes from enraged to intrigued to enlightened that will move one to tears. Shakespeare’s best soliloquies convey only a fraction of the emotions that Buckley expresses with nary a word.
Hamnet, the runaway winner of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, finds great power by revisiting Hamlet anew. Few playwrights and poets master language in ways that Shakespeare does and while his verses continue to enchant audiences, they continually find new meaning as remounted plays and adaptations allow contemporary resonance to infiltrate the text. Yet by going back to the root of Shakespeare’s most famed tragedy, Hamnet lets the Bard’s words hit with unexpectedly therapeutic power. Hamlet may be one Shakespeare’s colder plays, as productions often interpret it intellectually rather than emotionally. But Zhao’s film illustrates that Hamlet actually shows Shakespeare at his most vulnerable. If the best art draws from life, then Hamnet beautifully illustrates why the greatest tragedy can be history itself.
