What Watching Hamnet Does to You
Watching Hamnet is like being slowly emptied out from the inside. You keep falling deeper into a sadness that feels like it has no bottom.
Watching Hamnet is like being slowly emptied out from the inside. You keep falling deeper into a sadness that feels like it has no bottom. The film plays a mean trick with its happy moments. It gives you just enough life to make you forget the grief for a second. Then the cold comes back harder. That is what watching Hamnet does to you. It makes you feel everything twice.
Chloe Zhao (Director) does not rush anything. Long stretches pass where nothing happens except a woman grinding herbs or a boy watching his father pack a bag. She builds scenes the way we build a fire, one small piece at a time, until the heat becomes unbearable. The pacing will test some viewers. By the final act you understand why she made you sit with all of it.
Jessie Buckley plays Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare, and she is the soul of the film. She carries grief in her body. You can see it settle into her shoulders, her jaw, her hands. There is a long stretch near the end where she barely speaks, and her face does all the work. It is one of the finest pieces of screen acting I have seen in a long time. Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare not as a genius but as a man who keeps failing the people he loves most. He is proud and tender and completely lost.
Jacobi Jupe plays Hamnet with a stillness and warmth that makes his disappearance from the film feel physical. You feel the air change when he is gone. That is what watching Hamnet does to you. It makes absence feel louder than presence.
The camera treats the English countryside like a living character. Light falls through trees as if the forest is breathing. Soil appears under fingernails, on hems, in the cracks of wooden floors. Yet nothing is decorative. Every image earns its place. Max Richter's score is powerful. Through the score, I could see Zhao asking us to cry before we are ready.
What holds the film together is its understanding that grief is a physical map where no two people walk the same path. For Agnes it lives in her body because she was the one who held their son as he died. For William the stage becomes a way to rewrite reality, casting himself as the Ghost so his boy can survive as Hamlet. Zhao never tells you this directly. She lets the final sequence at the theatre in London reveal it. Agnes watching the play, watching her husband perform their loss for strangers, is one of the most quietly shattering scenes. Their separate grief is pulled into the light at last. Not resolved. Just shared. That is what watching Hamnet does to you. It splits open the difference between mourning alone and mourning together and makes you feel the weight of both.
There is a thread running through the film borrowed from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a story William once told Agnes in their early days together. In the myth, looking back brings permanent loss. The film finds mercy in that idea. When Agnes finally reaches London and tells William to look at her, she is not asking him to stop grieving. She is asking him to stop living inside the ghost of their son and see the woman still standing in front of him. In the myth the look was a death sentence. Here it is something closer to rescue.
The film draws its power from something harder to name. Two people who love each other fiercely but cannot seem to stand in the same room with their pain at the same time. By the end they find a way. That is enough.
Hamnet (2025) is a historical drama film based on the 2020 novel by Maggie O'Farrell, focusing on the life of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, as they navigate grief following the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet.
Shivam Tomar (b. 1995) is an Indian poet, translator, and the founder-editor of Poems India.
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