Chloé Zhao’s ‘Hamnet’ makes the case for re-interpretation

William Shakespeare needs no introduction, and he doesn’t get one in Hamnet, where he’s played with rankling selfishness and romantic flair by an eager Paul Mescal. Referred to only as Will—he’s more of a character here than in Maggie O'Farrell’s eponymous novel, in which he’s barely present—we meet him when he crosses paths with the buoyant hawk wrangler Agnes for the first time, while tutoring her younger brothers in Latin to pay off his father’s debts. Their connection is instantaneous, and before long, they’re married in a secret ceremony in the woods, as the movie skips forward many years to their domestic lives as parents in the lush greenery of Stratford-upon-Avon. They have a diligent teenager, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and mischievous younger twins Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), the latter of whom is the locus for the movie’s melodramatic tragedy, which slowly begins when Will moves away for work, and gradually builds up steam.

It isn’t a spoiler to say that Hamnet succumbs to an illness, much as he did some 400 years ago. The movie isn’t trying to build suspense in this regard, but rather, it betrays an awareness of this inevitability right from its opening scene, which its screenplay—co-written by Zhao and O’Farrell—fashions into a tale of mystical foresight. The movie’s first images are of the fae-like Agnes huddled in fetal position by the mouth of a cavern beneath a tree, as though this pitch-black maw had just given birth to her. The camera falls frequently on natural elements, like rustling trees, and pushes into negative space, beckoning a kind of pantheistic reading with each aesthetic gesture. Rumors abound about Agnes’ origins—people call her “the daughter of a forest witch”—and while this causes little friction, it hints towards a powerful undercurrent. Nature has given her life, and it can just as easily snatch it away.

Zhao’s measured camera (courtesy of cinematographer Łukasz Żal) is a far cry from her previous docu-Western works like Nomadland, in which free-flowing frames harness the awesome power of American landscapes. There’s far more gentleness here, and more of a rehearsed quality to the drama, which is by no means a knock against it. But what these two forms of cinema have in common is the sliver of overlap between the natural and manmade worlds, in which Zhao tends to find the soul of her stories. The distinction is in the approach. Hamnet, which peels back rigid social mores in search of realism, arrives from the opposite end of the spectrum, and is born of the same rigid studio channels that led to Zhao’s first fumble, the Marvel action drama Eternals. However, Hamnet proves a worthy comeback, and establishes Zhao as a more classical dramatist compared to her more visually and emotionally improvisational films, especially her micro-budget indies The Rider and Songs My Brothers Taught Me, which have practically spawned their own genre.

Zhao doesn’t merely retreat towards classicism; she makes it pliant to the point of misery porn, but pulls back from that precipice at the last possible second, thanks to the winning combination of her cast. There’s an immense and distinctly modern naturalism to each performance. Buckley’s wry smile turns quickly into confounding grief, leaving her lost at sea until her husband’s stage play guides her back to shore. Mescal humanizes a myth by giving him frustrating and frustrated dimensions in equal measure. However, the film’s secret weapon is its supporting ensemble, and the way they’re cast. Jupe, the 12-year-old actor playing Hamnet, is brave and beautiful in the face of sorrow and uncertainty, and he bears a striking resemblance to Joe Alwyn, the actor playing Agnes’ supportive brother Bartholomew. And, in the minor role of the actor playing Hamlet on stage, Zhao drafts none other than Jupe’s own older brother Noah Jupe of Wonder and A Quiet Place, further strengthening the resemblance between the stage play and the torrid reality on which it’s (allegedly) based, in a pretty-good climax that rests on composer Max Richter’s effervescent strings. 

The problems, however, begin with the fact that Hamnet feels too vast a story for its mere two-hour runtime, during which the emotional schism between Will and Agnes—over the former’s dedication to his work in London, and the latter’s need for comfort in trying times—are often relegated to obligatory beats. Add to this the film’s prescriptivism in the realm of establishing connections between Hamlet and Shakespeare’s son—expressed through hasty dialogue, rather than feeling—and the result is a movie that guides its audience too hastily toward intellectual conclusions, without letting their emotional counterparts marinate.

Still, the narrative’s spiritual nature grants permission to this fast-forward unfurling. Agnes claims the women in her family can see things others can’t, a kind of obfuscated precognition that invites the future to arrive faster than it normally would. Hamnet is, after all, a film located in the present despite being set in the past. Its characters shush each other at the famously rowdy Globe Theatre; they speak modern English in their daily lives (Mescal’s Shakespeare says “yeah”), and default to an Elizabethan dialect only on stage, as though it were a piece of antiquity. Most pertinently, the characters’ drama is an extension of O'Farrell’s reappraisal, which is not only speculative, but reconstructive. It’s practically fan fiction meant to re-center figures like Agnes and Hamnet in the life and artistry of the Bard, after having been reduced to mere footnotes in his biography.

The film may not always cohere, but its emotional highs are immense, and they ultimately adhere to more historical readings of Hamlet’s creation—namely, as a purgatorial tale confronting death in the wake of Christian Reformation. Rather than departing from these readings and imposing their own, Zhao and O’Farrell situate Hamnet’s story within this tumultuous time period of religious transformation, pulling a literal fabric over scenes of spiritual imagination, and forcing us to view the movie’s ghosts through a tangible haze. All the while, the movie keeps returning to the negative space of its opening images, warping it in brand new permutations as the camera falls on darkened passageways, and the narrative cedes space to the emptiness that consumes Will and Agnes in the wake of Hamnet’s death. Perhaps it should have, and could have, ruminated on these ideas for longer, if only to more tightly grip the grief and anguish it features in hints and spurts. But despite letting this power slip from its grasp, it remains a remarkable highlight among the year’s more straightforward studio dramas. It may untangle its knots too neatly, but until such a time as it does, its obliqueness is purposeful enough, and mysterious enough, to lure you in before gently tugging the rug out from under you, luring you to conclusions that, although they feel preordained, spring forth from the idea that both art and its interpretation should be transformative.