Hamnet

Director – Chloé Zhao – 2025 – UK, US – Cert. 12a – 125m

*****

An imagining of the story of William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, whose name gave rise to the play Hamlet – Maggie O’Farrell’s adaptation of her own novel is out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 9th

According to the opening title card, the names Hamlet and Hamnet were regarded as interchangeable in Elizabethan England. This is curious, since the piece’s female lead (Jessie Buckley from Women Talking, Sarah Polley, 2022; Men, Alex Garland, 2022; Misbehaviour, Philippa Lowthorpe, 2020) appears to be variously addressed as Alice, Agnes or Anyes while the male lead (Paul Mescal from Gladiator II, Ridley Scott, 2024; All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh, 2023; Aftersun, Charlotte Wells, 2022) is not referred to by name as William Shakespeare until well towards the end. Since this is being promoted as the story of William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, whose name gave rise to the play Hamlet – as you can see from the trailer below – audiences will enter the film knowing who the Paul Mescal character is as soon as he appears unnamed.

The outdoors, looking up through the trees of a forest. A woman clad in a dress of earthen red (Buckley) lies as if curled up in a womb at the foot of a great tree, within the roots of which lies a circular, black void. Awake and walking, she uses a falconry glove to allow a hawk to alight on her hand, feeding it a tasty titbit. A tutor (Mescal) is teaching Latin to boys of a local family, but feels constrained by the position, as if by the lead bars that line the windows. He wants to be outside, and the sight of the red girl causes him to leave the room and his charges, finding her and her hawk in a barn. Later, he is kissing her, although she warns him off. Not that effectively, however, because on their next meeting, after she has begged him for a story and he has recounted a brief outline of Orpheus and Euridice, they have sex. She also delivers a premonition: she sees herself dying attended by her two children.

Agnes becomes pregnant and is disowned by her mother (who, it turns out, is not her real mother who died when Agnes was six). The man’s parents John (David Wilmot from Calm With Horses, Nick Rowland, 2019; Little Joe, Jessica Hausner, 2019; 71, Yann Demange, 2014; The Guard, John Michael McDonagh, 2011) and Mary (Emily Watson from Steve, Tim Mielants, 2025; Small Things Like These, Tim Mielants, 2024; Breaking the Waves, Lars Von Trier, 1996) are none to keen that he marry her. She goes out into the woods to give birth to their child, a girl.

The man settles into family life with beloved wife Agnes and their daughter Susanna, but struggles with writing, and with his wife’s blessing periodically leaves to go to London where England’s theatre community is situated. Agnes becomes pregnant again with their second child, birthed in her husband’s absence under the supervision of mother Mary, which turns out to be twins, of whom the daughter appears stillborn but miraculously revives after Agnes insists she hold the baby while the son is much healthier.

Now there are three children – the eldest Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and the twins Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe, from Peter Pan and Wendy, David Lowery, 2024). The two twins, whose beds are beside one another, are inseparable, on one occasion dressing up in each others clothes and assuming each other’s identities, a prank which their parents treat as everyday play. All three kids perform bits of their father’s writings, at one point recognisably making themselves over as Macbeth’s witches. Hamnet wants to follow his father into the theatre, perhaps as an actor, and practises his stage swordplay. But then tragedy strikes England in the form of plague, and the sickly Judith looks likely to succumb until devoted twin brother Hamnet tells her he’ll take her disease upon himself to save her. He dies.

His father, returning from London, only arrives shortly after the boy’s death. He is grief-stricken, but his wife resents the fact that he was away. The distance between husband and wife grows; he departs for the capital once more. Learning of the success of his play Hamlet, Agnes’ brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn from The Brutalist, Brady Corbet, 2025; The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018; Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ang Lee, 2016), who has supported her through everything that has gone before, takes her to London to see the play at the Globe Theatre. With a painted backdrop of a wood with a doorway into blackness, and with Hamlet’s father played by playwright William Shakespeare himself, the stage is set for a family catharsis…

Director Zhao demonstrated a strong feeling for landscape on Nomadland (2020), and that sensibility again serves her well here with much of the proceedings taking place in a poor Elizabethan house and the surrounding forest, although there are also a few other houses and a trip to London, Shakespeare’s lodgings and the Globe Theatre. This is much more about Shakespeare’s wife and kids, the family tragedy and bereavement and the play that grew out of it. The source material is the eponymous novel by Maggie O’Farrell, who co-wrote the screenplay with Zhao.

We only see fragments of the play being performed, with Agnes in the audience, first feeling it’s a travesty only to later become immersed in the experience which, it turns out, has great personal meaning and significance for her.

Jessie Buckley is remarkable in a role which allows her acting a very broad range in which to play, while Mescal convinces as a not yet famous playwright struggling to both get by and find his voice. The two twins are striking, in particular Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet, whose more established elder brother Noah, now a young man following roles as a child in The Night Manager (TV series, 2016) and A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018), turns up playing him as Hamlet in the play at the end, where the latter is made up to resemble his younger sibling, in a highly resonant piece of casting. The coup de grace, though, is in the denouement of the final scene, an extraordinary achievement by all involved, both cast and crew, which is likely to have you in tears.

The film ends as poignantly as it begins, gazing into the black void of what Shakespeare called “the undiscovered country”.

Hamnet is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, Friday, January 9th.

Trailer: