KEEP YOUR HEART OPEN.

There isn’t much we know about the life of Anne Hathaway, wife of William Shakespeare. That gave author Maggie O’Farrell an opening to imagine her personality, actions and grief after losing her son Hamnet, a boy who died at the age of eleven but has gone down in history as a potential source of inspiration for his father as he wrote his famous plays, not least the one titled ”Hamlet”. Published in 2020, the novel won awards for its heartfelt portrayal of grief, as O’Farrell tapped deeply into her own fears of losing a child.

Excursions into the woods
In 1582, 18-year-old William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) falls in love with Agnes (Jessie Buckley), a union that isn’t popular with Will’s mother Mary (Emily Watson). After all, Agnes has a certain reputation. She could be the daughter of a forest witch, what with her knowledge of herbal medicine and her constant excursions into the woods. Agnes even has a pet hawk. But the young lovers are indeed very much in love, and soon she’s pregnant. The Shakespeares accept her into their family, but as Agnes start raising children it’s increasingly clear that Will won’t be able to support his family where they live; he’s no good with tools.

He goes to London to make a career out of writing and the theater. But when the couple endure the worst crisis imaginable, his absence causes a rift.

Tough to sit through
O’Farrell’s novel was turned into a play in 2023 and it didn’t take long for the film adaptation to take shape. A movie is naturally a powerful medium for a story about grief and much has been made about how tough it is to sit through for any parent. I’d say the rest of us in the audience  are not immune either; as i sat through the two most moving sequences of the film, the death of Hamnet and the climactic performance of ”Hamlet” at the Globe with Agnes attending, all I could hear in the cinema, tears streaming down my face, were quiet sobs.

Jessie Buckley’s outstanding, no-holds-barred performance dominates; she makes us feel her pain.

The filmmakers handle these scenes with great skill, making sure Buckley’s outstanding, no-holds-barred performance dominates; she makes us feel her pain and, ultimately, peace as she finds the chance to say goodbye to her son properly. That happens through the theater and the point certainly comes across; the communal experience of sharing a play with everybody else, including the actors on stage, can have a transcendent, even healing, effect. We don’t really know how much the boy’s death affected Shakespeare, but the film capably supports O’Farrell’s notion that ”Hamlet” becomes Will’s way of dealing with his own grief. A clever part of the film is casting Hamnet with young Jacobi Jupe and then the stage actor who plays Hamlet with Jacobi’s much more famous older brother Noah; it’s not hard to see what Agnes sees in Hamlet’s face when he first appears on that stage. Mescal is also good as the troubled writer who gives the art of glove-making (which is his father’s livelihood) a chance, but knows that something must change.

O’Farrell did a lot of research about this era while working on the novel, and she brings that knowledge into the movie; it’s not just a lush portrait of Agnes’s connection with nature, but also a mostly realistic vision of Tudor England, with a faithful recreation of a Globe performance.

I don’t think naming the lead character ”Agnes” is an attempt to distance her from the real-life Anne Hathaway – we know from her father’s will that she was sometimes called Agnes. But it’s still clear that O’Farrell and Chloé Zhao did their best not to craft a proper biography, but to focus on the honest emotions that remain as raw today as they were in 1596.

Hamnet 2025-U.K.-U.S. 126 min. Color. Directed by Chloé Zhao. Screenplay: Chloé Zhao, Maggie O’Farrell. Novel: Maggie O’Farrell. Cinematography: Lukasz Zal. Music: Max Richter. Production Design: Fiona Crombie. Cast: Jessie Buckley (Agnes), Paul Mescal (William Shakespeare), Emily Watson (Mary Shakespeare), Joe Alwyn, Jacobi Jupe, Olivia Lynes, Noah Jupe.

Trivia: Co-produced by Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes; co-executive produced by Zhao.

Oscar: Best Actress (Buckley). BAFTA: Outstanding British Film, Best Actress (Buckley). Golden Globes: Best Motion Picture (Drama), Actress (Buckley).

Last word: “I did not know Jessie was going to scream. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know what Jacobi was going to do. I had no idea what the two of them were going to do. We create an environment. By then, we’ve been together for a couple of months, cast, crew, everyone knew what today is, it was like a ceremony. It wasn’t doing a scene. The pin could drop. Everyone in that moment was feeling something from the beginning of the day, something they loved they’d lost. So Jessie and Jacobi were channeling what all the people that are their found family in this last few months are feeling as well, and so the truth we capture in the moment is the only thing that we need to stand by.” (Zhao on filming Hamnet’s death scene, Indiewire)