Hamnet: Inside views of a farewell

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet rejects biography and seeks the inner logic of loss. Her film shows how art arises not from inspiration, but from experience.

A film about William Shakespeare’s early years naturally runs the risk of getting lost in myths: in the narrative of the precocious genius, in the fetishisation of inspiration, in the cheap mystery surrounding the creation of a world-famous work. Hamnet – now highly nominated for both Oscars and BAFTAS and awarded Best Drama at the Golden Globes – rejects all of this with remarkable consistency. Director Chloé Zhao is not interested in the birth of the poet, but in the conditions of a life from which literature emerges only as a late, painful necessity. The fact that Maggie O’Farrell, author of the novel Hamnet, was herself involved in the screenplay is likely to be more than just a production note: it explains the film’s close proximity to its literary source material – not in terms of historical accuracy, but in tone, perspective and emotional logic.

In Zhao’s film, Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1580s does not appear as the picturesque birthplace of a national poet, but as a socially and physically demanding living environment. Birth, illness, superstition and death are not dramatic accents, but a constantly pulsating background noise. In this world, William Shakespeare and Agnes Hathaway do not meet as a romantic couple, but as two people who, in their unbridled passion, promise each other support without realising how fragile that support will be.

Paul Mescal plays William with a restraint that is immediately recognisable after his intense roles in Aftersun. Aftersun and All of Us Strangers– and which is all the more soothing after his rather alienating performance in the large-scale Gladiator II, where he had little room for ambivalence. Here, Mescal is back to his old self: he plays a young man who perceives more than he speaks, whose artistic ambition is initially expressed not as self-expression but as escape. London is both a promise and an imposition, while Stratford becomes a place of guilt.

The real centre of the film, however, is Agnes. Jessie Buckley eludes any folkloric interpretation of the ‘enigmatic healer’. After her sharply contoured, almost burlesque performance in Wicked Little Letters, she is hardly recognisable here: quieter, darker, with an earthiness that seems not acted but carried. Only her crooked smile, which for a moment recalls Ellen Barkin’s laugh in Harold Baker’s Sea of Love, hints at the ambivalence of her role: Agnes is a mother, an outsider, a projection screen for superstition – and at the same time the most emotionally stable character in the film. Buckley lends her a dignity that is neither heroic nor explanatory.

Zhao stages this world with a density that at first seems almost overwhelming. The first two-thirds of the film are dominated by suffering, foreboding and loss. Difficult births, the omnipresent threat of the plague, the mistrust of the community – all this comes together to form a tableau that aims less at narrative climax than at atmospheric saturation. In this respect, Hamnet is reminiscent of the novels of the German realist author Theodor Fontane, in which disaster is palpable long before it strikes: as a quiet pressure, as social constriction, as a barely articulable premonition. Zhao pursues these motifs so consistently that, as a viewer, one almost retreats into emotional defensiveness from the very beginning – a possible overload calculated by Zhalo.

Chloé Zhao’s approach becomes particularly clear when compared to Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, which premiered at Cannes in 2025. Linklater focuses on the surface of the artists shown there, i.e. the filmmakers: we observe production conditions, gestures, discourses, the technical and organisational creation of a masterpiece. But behind Godard’s mask of sunglasses, awkward genius and pose, there is hardly any psychological space. What drives him, what shapes or damages him internally, remains largely unexplored.

 The viewer is present for the ‘external view’ of Breathless, but not for the inner necessity from which such a work emerges. With Zhao, it is exactly the opposite. Her Hamnet is a radical counter-model to this form of artist portraiture. Her ‘making of’ a masterpiece – ultimately Hamlet– refuses to provide technical, biographical or discursive explanations. Instead, it is a consistent inside view: a narrative of loss, guilt and emotional emptiness, from which art emerges not as the result of intellect or theory, but as a form of survival. We learn almost nothing about Shakespeare’s literary coming of age; only at the very end does Zhao show us a result. And even that is done with caution, though not always free of simplification – for example, in the hinted-at ‘to be or not to be’ scene, which comes across as somewhat flat, almost grotesque.

The fact that Hamnet turns out so decidedly different can perhaps be explained by Chloé Zhao’s previous work, which is characterised by remarkable heterogeneity. After The Rider (2017), an almost documentary-like portrait of masculinity, the body and vulnerability in the American West, and Nomadland (2020), which translated existential precariousness into an open, almost essayistic road movie form, Eternals (2021) seemed like a foreign body: a superhero film in which Zhao’s interest in landscape, bodies and the passage of time only shone through sporadically. Hamnet does not mark a retreat, but rather a renewed shift – away from social space, away from genre, towards a historical yet radically internal narrative. It is precisely this difference that makes it clear that Zhao does not pursue a signature style in the narrow sense, but rather constantly rebalances themes and forms. Her films are not similar to each other, they contradict each other – and therein lies their fragile consistency.

But then, in the last twenty minutes, Hamnet takes a remarkable turn. The death of Hamnet – the son to whom William was particularly close – is not staged as a melodramatic climax, but as a void. And from this void, Zhao succeeds in taking a double step: she leads the film out of darkness without negating it, and makes it possible to experience what art can achieve at its core. Not consolation, not explanation, but catharsis.

Here, and only here, after a long, somewhat excessive ‘prelude’, does the film begin to breathe and touch the viewer. The previously almost overstretched motifs of suffering find their justification in an ending that does not force empathy, but makes it possible. One understands – quietly, almost physically – how personal loss can give rise to something greater than a biography. And therein lies the real strength of Hamnet: in the sober, literarily grounded insight that art is not born of inspiration, but of the attempt to live with the inevitable.