Movie Review: HAMNET

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: November 21st, 2025 / 04:21 AM

HAMNET movie poster | ©2025 Focus Features

Rating: PG-13
Stars: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Joe Alwyn, Emily Watson, Jacobi Jupe, Olivia Lynes, Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Noah Jupe, David Wilmot, Justine Mitchell
Writers: Chloé Zhao & Maggie O’Farrell, based on the novel HAMNET by Maggie O’Farrell
Director: Chloé Zhao
Distributor: Focus Features
Release Date: November 26, 2025

Over four hundred years after his death, William Shakespeare remains the most lauded playwright in the English language and HAMLET is arguably his most revered play.

Written and first performed sometime between 1599 and 1601, HAMLET’s title character shares a name with Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet (Hamnet and Hamlet were considered interchangeable monikers in those days). This is obviously not a coincidence.

In her 2020 novel HAMNET, Maggie O’Farrell provided an interpretation of the linkage between the real child and the fictional prince. Now Farrell has collaborated on the script for the screen version with director Chloé Zhao, and the results are moving in ways we both do and don’t expect.

HAMNET is told in mostly chronological order, when glove-maker’s son Will (Paul Mescal), serving as tutor to three young sons of a wealthy farmer, falls for that family’s eldest daughter. Historically, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway; here, she’s called Agnes (Jessie Buckley).

Agnes and her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), are the children of the farmer’s first wife, rumored to be a “wood witch.” Agnes proudly accepts that title – indeed, our first sight of her is when she’s curled up sleeping on the roots of an oak tree so gigantic is looks like it’s the size of a castle.

There’s a dark, mysterious hole at the bottom of the tree that comes to stand in for “the undiscovered country.” While it’s never stated, it’s also implied that Agnes’s affinity for earth magic comes to be reflected in supernatural elements of Will’s writing.

Agnes’s stepmother Joan (Justine Mitchell) thoroughly disapproves of her stepdaughter but doesn’t want her marrying Will either; neither does Will’s mother Mary (Emily Watson). Good thing Bartholomew wants his sister to be happy, to say nothing of the fact that nobody really would benefit from Agnes and Will still being unwed when their first baby, already on the way, is born.

Will goes to London as an emissary of his father’s glove business. Then he becomes glove maker for a theatrical company. We don’t see what comes next there, but we know what’s happening, both from general history and from what Agnes understands of Will’s employment.

Then the couple has twins, sturdy Hamnet and frail Judith. Superstitiously fearful and ferociously protective of her children – especially Judith, who may fall ill in a big city’s comparatively foul air – Agnes finds one reason after another not to move to London, no matter how much Will urges.

Finally, Will accepts that Agnes isn’t going to budge and buys their family an enormous house in Stratford-upon-Avon. But before they can move, tragedy strikes.

Agnes is furious with Will for not being there at the time, and angrier still that he does not grieve the way that she grieves.

But it is through the prism of the performed HAMLET that all of Will’s emotions find expression.

This description doesn’t do HAMNET the film justice – it’s one of those dramas that has to be seen to be comprehended. What starts out as potentially just beautifully shot (by cinematographer Lukasz Zal) Elizabethan romance and melodrama steadily becomes philosophically resonant and viscerally powerful.

Buckley’s performance and the writing of Agnes take her from being someone we’re viewing to someone who – at least for those of us who have lost someone close – commands our identification. Even when we know she’s being unreasonable or is jumping to wrong conclusions, Agnes is so vulnerable and impassioned and absolute that she seems the embodiment of her states of being.

Will as written and played has no notion that he’s a genius or a figure of destiny or anything of that sort. Mescal starts off quieter and more cautious than Buckley’s Agnes, but surges into Will, so we observe (rather than are told) that he uses writing as a way of channeling his own intensity into something other than madness. When he snaps at an actor, it’s not out of artistic pretension, it’s because the actor isn’t exorcising Will’s demons in the intended manner.

In a stroke of casting luck/genius, young Hamnet is played by Jacobi Jupe, while his older brother Noah Jupe plays the actor portraying Hamlet. The similarity underscores what both the filmmakers and Will intend to convey, and both performers are excellent. Alwyn, Watson, and Mitchell are all strong in their support. Olivia Lynes as Judith and Bodhi Rae Breathnach as Susanna are lively and natural.

HAMNET doesn’t hammer its themes but instead shows rather than tells. It’s the relatively rare piece where people who are articulate have troubles that do not arise out of secrets or lies, but rather from incidents that must be survived and then absorbed. For all the stage artifice of its final portions, HAMNET is luminously lifelike and ultimately strangely uplifting.

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