chloe zhao

The poignant drama Hamnet opens on two trees standing tall and steady, a slow pan revealing their interconnected roots. Grief and memory, compassion and resilience braid throughout this tender film, forging a family’s intimate heartbreak into something universal and layered. Directed by Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao (Nomadland), Hamnet adapts Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name dramatizing the family life of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes. Their son, Hamnet, died at age eleven, and both the book and the film connect that shattering loss to the writing of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, Hamlet, a name used interchangeably with Hamnet at the time.

In Hamnet, director Chloé Zhao fictionalizes both birth and death in the Bard of Avon’s early days, imagining the death of William Shakespeare’s young son Hamnet as the catalyst for the play Hamlet. Blending delirious joy and heartbreaking grief, Zhao dramatizes the volatile collision of ecstasy with anguish. Co-writing the screenplay with Zhao, adapting her 2020 novel, Maggie O’Farrell explores Elizabethan England’s class dictates clashing with efforts to support a family. As William’s wife Agnes, Jessie Buckley compellingly humanizes a woman transitioning from a seductively feisty woman to a loving wife, from excruciating births to mounting resentment, from insufferable loss to shared understanding. Buckley delivers a tour-de-force performance matched by Paul Mescal as Shakespeare.