Hamnet Review

by Cineman and Morgan Morris

This review contains minor plot details from the book (and history?).

Gather round folks! We got to see Hamnet early. You’re going to want to read this one. Hamnet is historical drama directed by Chloé Zhao, starring Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare, with cinematography by Łukasz Żal. The film adapts Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about the Shakespeare family’s grief after losing their son. Check out our team’s review of the film to help you decide if it’s worth watching at the big screen this weekend.

CINEMAN

Some films arrive already carrying the weight of expectation. Hamnet arrives carrying grief. Deep, old, inherited grief. And it does not flinch.

It might feel, at first glance, like Hamnet is emotionally manipulative. It’s not. If you’ve ever heard Chloé Zhao speak about her work, you’ll know how sincere and grounded her humanistic approach to storytelling is. What she has crafted here is not manipulation, but an offering. A devastating one. I’ve also landed on the fact that there is nothing inherently wrong with a film manipulating emotion, as long as it’s not doing so in service of propaganda or something insidious. This film earns every tear it draws. The tagline is literally “Keep your heart open”. And that’s exactly what I recommend you do when watching this.

And yes, “On the Nature of Daylight” is still a cheat code. But honestly, I’ll allow it.

Every single time Jessie Buckley appeared on screen, the audience was crying. Not sniffling. Crying. Her performance is extraordinary in a way that feels almost unfair to the rest of the awards season. I cannot see it beaten. Objectively. I can’t. There is a rawness and openness to what she does here that bypasses performance entirely and lands somewhere closer to lived experience.

With Hamnet, Chloé Zhao continues to cement herself as a commanding director, completely in control of tone, rhythm, and emotional flow. She embraces a feminine gaze without apology, allowing stillness, intimacy, and feeling to take up space. This is cinema that listens as much as it speaks, and Zhao understands exactly when to step back and let her characters breathe.

I found out shortly before watching Hamnet that the director of photography was Łukasz Żal, and once you know that, it’s impossible not to see echoes of his recent work, particularly the wide compositions and slow pans associated with The Zone of Interest. Hamnet leans into wide, lingering, often stationary shots that hold you at a slight distance (or maybe I just noticed when it did this?). At times, I found myself wishing for more of the intimate, almost documentary-like closeness that defined Zhao’s earlier work. Even so, the visual language remains striking, controlled, and deeply intentional.

This is a film about loss, yes, but also about the quiet terror of loving fully when you know how fragile everything is. Hamnet doesn’t rush you through that feeling. It asks you to sit in it.

Cineman’s Rating: 9.5/10

MORGAN MORRIS

A review by Morgan Morris

As a child, Maggie O’Farrell contracted encephalitis, an often-fatal inflammation of the brain, a condition that kept her in hospital for the better part of a year. Later, as a mother herself, she found herself in the hospital again, this time watching one of her children suffer through a slew of life-threatening allergies.

As an author, O’Farrell would channel these brushes with death into her writing.

As she would do in her lauded novel Hamnet, in which she found a kindred spirit – or perhaps an avatar – in Anne Hathaway, the wife of one William Shakespeare.

Relatively little is known of the historical couple, and their family life. What is known is that the couple had three children, including a twin boy and girl. And that the boy, named Hamnet, had died in 1596 aged 11, likely from the bubonic plague, a disease known to have cut a swathe through children in England at the time.

It is the boy’s death that sits at the heart of the novel, which has now been adapted into a film by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao of Nomadland’ and Eternals fame. Zhao also co-wrote the screenplay with O’Farrell.

The lack of historical detail allows both author and filmmaker the luxury of creative licence. So Anne Hathaway, also known as Agnes, as she is named in the book and film, is imagined as a free-spirited healer and herbalist, most likely to be found playing with a hawk in the forest. Which not surprisingly draws a young William Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal), then labouring anonymously in his father’s leather business, to her. (Shakespeare was, records show, four years younger than the 22-year-old Anne.)

Taking a straightforward chronological approach to the reportedly more “elliptical” book, the film starts with the young couple’s courtship, during which William quickly knocks her up. It continues to their marriage (much to the ire of his mother, played by Emily Watson, as the 18-year-old William was not a legal adult), the birth of their children, and then, of course, Hamnet’s death.

The loss of their child put further strains on the couple’s marriage, already riding a few bumps. William is by then a frustrated writer, and had moved to London to pursue his literary fortunes. So he is often absent from home, notably when the child dies. (A British comedy show, ‘Upstart Crow’, makes more of this disconnect between Shakespeare’s London and home lives, and his genius versus his homely and illiterate, although kindly and supportive, wife.)

Expect no narrative twists and turns from Hamnet. This is a film about a couple’s grief. No more, no less.

For resolution, the book and the film lean into – as many literary scholars have – the similarity of the child’s name, and that of Shakespeare’s most famous creation, the Danish prince Hamlet, the play completed a few years after Hamnet’s death. The laboured connection may not work for some.

What does work is Jessie Buckley’s performance as Agnes. Running the gamut from bohemian outsider to passionate lover, from snubbed wife to grieving mother, Buckley doesn’t put a foot wrong. As with the book, though the name may suggest otherwise, this is Agnes’ story. Likewise, this is Buckley’s film.

All that’s left for Zhao to do is to let Buckley’s star shine, and for the likes of Mescal and Watson to provide capable support. Which everyone, wisely, does.

SPOILER ALERT. If you are not a sociopath, you are going to cry.

Morgan’s Rating: 7/10

Overall Team Rating: 8/10 (Rounded down)

Hamnet releases in theatres on 30 January 2026.

Follow BTG Lifestyle on Twitter @btglifestyle and LIKE us on Facebook. Subscribe to the BTG Lifestyle movie blog for updates, and email us at info [at] btglifestyle.com if you have feedback, or would like to collaborate with us.