I woke up the day after seeing Hamnet, glanced at the palm of my hand as I reached to pick up a book, remembered the lines of dirt dug into Jessie Buckley’s palms in the film—tinged earth-green from pulverizing mugwort in a mortar—and burst into tears. Thank goodness the afternoon screening I went to at Circle Cinema was relatively dark and private, with the smattering of folks in the theater hooded in our own secret worlds, a steady flow of soft sobbing heard from behind or beside. I could really have used a collective howl after it ended; as it was, I left the theater shaking and stayed that way for almost 24 hours.
I know I’m not alone in not being okay after seeing this film. It’s visceral, it’s volcanic, it gets into your marrow and roots around in there. Some critics are calling it hammy and histrionic; it certainly isn’t shy about tipping way into emotional extremes, and like others I’m grumbly about the use of a too-familiar piece of music at its conclusion, which took me right out of the moment. But ultimately, Hamnet—director Chloé Zhao’s meditation on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2021 book linking the death of Will and Agnes Shakespeare’s son with the birth of the world’s greatest play—speaks with a much-needed honesty to things that matter a lot to me: how love and grief suffuse each other, how having children binds you to forces outside your control, and how art is its own kind of alchemy, not separate from but embedded with the forces of nature.
Hamnet plays consistently at the border of darkness and brightness, as if in homage to the way Shakespeare’s own work did. Zhao (who used tantric exercises and dream work in the production process, and co-wrote the script with Farrell) presents us with many polarities: Will and Agnes (played with vivid urgency by Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley in contrasting shades of blue and red), learning and intuition, city and forest, brother and sister, birth and death. Every time I thought “this is starting to feel reductionist,” the film crashed those polarities into each other to make some third thing that felt like a new, and realer, reality. The film’s very first image shows us the methodology: we see two giant trunks of what turns out to be one tree, with Agnes tucked under its roots. Then we see her view from below of the canopy, shimmering in the sky—an image that’s echoed in the film’s riveting, ecstatic final scene, where the audience at the premiere of Hamlet at the Globe, seen from overhead, shifts like a tide.
There’s another polarity at work here, too: one about life and art. Like the others, this one isn't a clean binary. Unlike Will, who is away in London during and again soon after their son’s death, Agnes—whose hawk nips bloody meat off her arm, who gives birth with a roar on the forest floor, who can see someone’s future by pressing the place between their thumb and forefinger—is fully present, experiencing the trauma and its aftermath in real time. Yet it was she who urged Will to leave home in the first place to pursue his art, having seen that the creative engine churning in his belly would take him down if it didn't get to move in its own way.
Hamnet grounds these ways of experiencing the world in textures and physical performances that feel deeply lived-in. As a sensory experience, the film is exquisite, full of lush greens and rough wood and sloppy mud and hand-stitched garments. Mescal walks like he’s got a motor in his pelvis; Buckley’s face, and that of every child actor, is a living canvas. Textual references, sound design, and visual motifs are used with precision and intention—especially the masterstroke image of a dark hole, repeated throughout the film, which starts as a place of foreboding and ends as a portal to the “undiscovered countries” Agnes has seen in Will’s future.
It turns out that Agnes’ herb-craft and future-sight—her mother was known as “a witch”—aren’t too different from what artists do when they grab at strands of insight or inspiration or imagery that don’t seem to be coming from themselves. Hamlet's Ophelia knows the meanings of rosemary and rue, as Agnes and her mother and her children do; the phrase "undiscovered country" enters the play as the place (like the dark place young Hamnet walks into at his death) "from whose bourn no traveller returns."
There’s not an argument being made here about which way of approaching life—through immediate presence or at a certain remove through art—is more commendable. Each has strengths and limitations; each can cause harm and bring healing. And at the end of the film, as Agnes sees for the first time what Will has made, the two approaches become a much, much larger one. Hamnet isn’t about any sort of “greatness”—we don’t even hear the name “William Shakespeare” until almost the final scene—but about working with the roots and sap of creation itself, the various alchemies that can transform life’s elements into something life-supporting, without bypassing either suffering or joy.
Hamnet is a work of art about the work of art: how it comes not from some disembodied brain but from the dirt and blood and grain of living, how death and creation are on a continuum, just like love and loss. The plague that took the Shakespeares’ son stands in the background of all this, much as the pandemic still does for us, alongside all our individual private misfortunes. What do we do with persistent, raw, unprocessed sorrow? The prospect of addressing it directly feels as unwelcome as sitting with it in silence feels unsustainable. Enter art, like this film, through which there is some return after all—not from the dark place, but through it.
