Updated November 25, 2025 at 10:31 AM MST
In her moving 2020 novel, Hamnet, the Northern Irish writer Maggie O'Farrell explored the possibility that a real-life tragedy may have inspired one of the greatest fictional tragedies ever written. William Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, died at the age of 11 in 1596 — a few years before the first recorded performances of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre in London.
From these facts, O'Farrell spun a historical fiction — a mix of research and speculation into Shakespeare's personal life, starting with his rapturous romance with a farmer's daughter, Anne Hathaway; the arrival of their three children; and the effect of Hamnet's death and Shakespeare's career on their marriage.
Now O'Farrell has co-written an adaptation of her novel with the director Chloé Zhao, and it plays like a more somber and realistic version of Shakespeare in Love: Call it Shakespeare in Grief. The chief focus isn't really Shakespeare at all, though he's sensitively played by Paul Mescal. The heart of the movie is Anne, though here, as in certain historical documents, she's referred to as Agnes; she's played by an extraordinary Jessie Buckley.
Agnes is a gifted healer with a deep connection to the earth; she's most at home wandering the woods near her family's farmhouse, in Stratford-upon-Avon. She falls into a passionate romance with William, who's tutoring her younger brothers in Latin to help out his father, a struggling glovemaker.
Agnes becomes pregnant, to the chagrin of both families, especially William's mother, Mary, played by a strong Emily Watson. Even so, the two lovers marry and settle down; Agnes gives birth to a daughter, Susanna. But before long, William, on the verge of becoming the most celebrated writer in the English language, is feeling boxed in by sleepy Stratford.
And so Agnes selflessly sends him off to London, knowing he'll find the creative outlet he seeks there. William is thus away when she gives birth to their twins, Hamnet and Judith. They enjoy a happy childhood, despite their father's long absences from home.
After her clunky 2021 Marvel movie, Eternals, it's good to see Zhao back on firmer footing with Hamnet, though it isn't necessarily a film I'd have expected her to make. With its English period setting and real-life historical figures, it's a far cry from dramas like Nomadland and Songs My Brothers Taught Me, which used a mix of fiction and nonfiction techniques to focus on little-seen corners of rural American life.
That said, there are echoes of the director's past work throughout Hamnet. William has some of the same vocational drivenness as, say, the rodeo cowboy we meet in Zhao's film The Rider, determined to do what he was born to do. But William's time away from home takes a heavy toll on Agnes and their children, and Hamnet is, among other things, a tense portrait of marital estrangement.
Agnes is, in many ways, a classic Zhao character, a woman deeply and eccentrically attuned to the natural world. She also feels like an amalgam of some of Buckley's past roles: the wild child she played in the thriller Beast, but also the ill-treated girlfriends she played in mind-bending films like Men and I'm Thinking of Ending Things.
There's an elemental force to Buckley's performance in Hamnet. When Agnes gives birth, or watches as her son takes his last breath, she howls her agony to the skies. At some point, Buckley doesn't even seem to be acting anymore, so effortlessly does she seem to inhabit Agnes' earthy mysticism, her maternal love and her bottomless grief and despair. She's the reason the film is as affecting as it is, especially at the climax, when we finally see how Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, and the first production of his play, Hamlet, converge.
I'm still wrestling with what I think of this sequence, which will undoubtedly move audiences to tears — the first time I saw it, I shed more than a few myself. It's undeniably effective. It also feels a little reductive, in the way that it regards an endlessly complex Shakespeare masterwork in purely therapeutic terms, a means of achieving closure. Zhao knows that, in the end, the play's the thing — but as staged here, it feels like a smaller, less meaningful thing than it should.
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