FILM OF THE WEEK: Hamnet - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

What does it mean to translate grief from page to body, from language to landscape? Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell’s luminous 2020 novel, offered an answer by shifting Shakespeare’s most famous play away from genius and towards loss - specifically, the death of his young son and the devastating impact it has on his wife, Agnes. The book reimagines a marriage shaped by love, separation, creativity and grief, centring Agnes as a woman deeply attuned to the natural world, whose bodily knowledge stands in quiet contrast to her husband’s relationship with words. Director Chloé Zhao’s adaptation approaches this story not as literary heritage but as a sensory experience, asking how grief is lived, not spoken, and how art emerges from the most private forms of pain.

Set in late-16th-century England, Hamnet follows Agnes, a fiercely intuitive woman with a profound connection to the natural world, and her husband Will, a grammar-school tutor whose relationship with language, combined with ambition, gradually pulls him away from home. Their marriage is passionate and loving, yet strained by distance, class and differing ways of understanding the world: Agnes through the body and nature, Will through words and work. When their children are born, the family finds balance and joy, but the sudden illness and death of their young son Hamnet fractures that equilibrium, forcing Agnes and Will into separate, often unspoken experiences of grief – a loss that will later find its echo in Will’s art, binding their private sorrow to one of the most famous plays ever written.

Zhao’s direction is sensory and unapologetically female, beautifully evoking the book’s portrayal of Agnes’ deep, connection to nature. As Agnes is of her mother, a woman rumoured to have been a forest witch, so too is she of the forest itself. A stunning image sees Agnes, dressed in the deep crimson dress that defines her sensuality and passion, curled up in the foetal position among the roots of a great oak tree, as if she were born of the earth.

Zhao’s attention to the landscape, capturing light and ambient sounds is immersive and awe-inspiring – and later, when Agnes becomes confined to the more domestic realm, Zhao’s understanding of space and light becomes brilliantly evocative, too. The oppressive darkness of the house, the heaviness of its wooden beams and walls shows how boxed-in Agnes feels when she is forced to keep within the bounds of a home, the rules, and the gendered expectations enforced by society and her disapproving mother-on-law (Emily Watson.)

When Agnes gives birth the second time, and is forcibly prevented from leaving the house due to the river banks flooding, we feel her panic. An act as natural as childbirth, in Agnes’ view, needs to take place in nature, not a house, and certainly not with judgemental women standing around her, policing her screams, her embodiment, her pain. As the river water begins to seep into the house, we feel the threat of nature but also Agnes’ connection to it: the unwavering sense that when she is prevented from going to it, nature itself rebels. When Agnes’ children are born, light glows though her world again. Sun-drenched scenes of the family running through fields, or Agnes teaching her daughter about the healing properties of plants, seem to create a sense of equilibrium in Agnes’ life. When devastation and grief arrives, it all takes places inside – the unnatural darkness of a mother losing a child being captured in the heavy visuals.

The striking connection Zhao creates between Agnes and nature is not echoed in her characterisation of Will and his relationship to language. One brief scene at the beginning of Will and Agnes’ courtship sees him recite a poem to her, but otherwise he remains a taciturn figure, and his passion and torment remain contained in a way that sometimes feels inaccessible and alienating. During the couple’s mutual but unshared experience of grief following the loss of their son, this alienation feels appropriate, but because Will begins as a relatively repressed character, this shift to disconnection between them doesn’t feel as stark or devastating as it might.

The focus of both the novel and the film is Agnes, not Will, and the desire to not let the legacy of William Shakespeare’s words overpower the film and her characterisation is understandable. Perhaps, had the screenplay let Will be a little more of a verbally expressive foil to Agnes’ embodied presence, we would not only understand him and their love more, but we would also more deeply feel his shift into grief. Mescal is a beautiful and committed actor but Will's shrinking fear of his father doesn't seem to make complete sense given his age and post-Gladiator physique.

Grief and the meaning we make of it is at the centre of this film, and – in contrast – Will’s use of the play Hamlet to explore his own emotions, as well as the complicated love between fathers and sons, is exquisitely expressed. As Agnes watches her husband’s sorrow enacted onstage, and we the audience experience Hamnet’s presence and loss in a different way, Max Richter’s score creates a transcendent atmosphere. Agnes finally understands her husband and feels un-alone in her grief. A moment where she reaches out to take the hand of an actor onstage, and others follow her example, creates a moment of deep empathy, understanding and connection between husband and wife that has been missing for so long.

The ending of the film feels revelatory, thanks to its powerful restraint. Though highly emotional, the poignancy is indirect, and also contained, creating – for me at least – an affective relationship with the audience. Like us watching the screen, Agnes is still, watching the play unfold on stage. We can feel the emotions swelling up inside her as they are in our own bodies, and can understand Will's feelings, and remember all the times we turned to art to explore the hardest moments of our lives. The visuals during this scene are beautiful: the feather cloak that Will dons on stage, the painted blonde of an actor’s hair resembling a painted cherub, sunlight flooding into the globe theatre, a stage entrance that moves from blackness to light – a stunning metaphor for not just mortality but the expression of emotion.

The middle section of the film is less sure of foot. When her child becomes ill, Agnes’ journey from fearful to frantic to grieving feels overwhelming. Jessie Buckley is remarkable and is rightly being rewarded for her performance as Agnes. But the twenty-minute long section that lingers on her children’s struggle to survive an illness, and Agnes’ various forms of crying, is too drawn out.

Ultimately, Hamnet is a work of rare emotional intelligence – one that understands grief not as a single rupture but as a long, relational process between bodies, spaces and art. When the film allows restraint, distance and indirect expression to flourish, it achieves something profound: a shared space in which audience, character and performance breathe together. In its closing movement, Hamnet captures the essential truth at the heart of O’Farrell’s novel – that art does not erase loss, but gives it shape, rhythm and light.

A deeply moving film, Hamnet offers us the understanding that grief, when witnessed and transformed, can become a form of connection rather than isolation.

Directed by Chloé Zhao. Written by Chloé Zhao & Maggie O’Farrell, based on the novel by Maggie O'Farrell. Cinematography by Łukasz Żal. Edited by Chloé Zhao, Affonso Gonçalves. Starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, Jacobi Jupe, Olivia Lynes. 125 mins

• In cinemas now. Watch the trailer below: