Jessie Buckley does the acting and Paul Mescal once again plays Paul Mescal in Hamnet, a biopic of Shakespeare tilting the spotlight towards his wife, Anne Hathaway. Agnes, in fact, pronounced the French way, or that’s the way this sweet and salty adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-seller has it.
Mescal, so often in a metaphorical leather jerkin, wears a real one this time around, playing the de-mythologised Shakespeare as stressed, hungover, doubtful of his own talents, a “useless… tradeless” (says his useless father) Latin teacher who meets a weirdo, “the daughter of a forest witch”, while she is out flying her hawk one day. He falls for her instantly, and she for him and soon, realising there will be objections to any proposed marriage from both families, they contrive to get her pregnant as a way of cutting quickly to the chase.
This early romantic stuff, all hot-breathed and urgent, is the best bit of the film, brooding and intense Mescal meeting brooding and intense Buckley right in the middle. It’s tender, lusty, beautifully done.
So is the period detail, the thatched, half-timbered life being one of damp, mud and physical effort, director Chloé Zhao reminding us here that she made her name with Nomadland, which did remarkable things welding together naturalistic detail with fiction.
In this telling Agnes is the power behind the throne. It’s she who suggests that her husband go to London to make his way as a writer, and she who provides the stable, loving home and hearth – plus children Susanna, Hamnet and his twin Judith – ready for her husband to return to in Stratford, 100 long miles away. She’s also the pagan, irrational counterbalance to William’s more rational, thoughtful man of words.
As said, Buckley does the acting, putting on the sort of display that awards committees moisten up over – the childbirth scenes of Agnes screaming her lungs out, legs agape, are particularly untethered. Much later, when the Shakespeares lose their son, Hamnet, to plague, she gets a second bite at the apple. This, the grief that undoes Agnes to the point where she is in danger of losing her mind, is what has already won Buckley so many awards. Will it win her an Oscar though? If not, she’ll get one at some point, that much seems entirely nailed on.
Jacobi Jupe is also particularly good as the young Hamnet, a bright spark whose intelligent performance is echoed later on by his older brother, Noah, who plays Hamlet down in London on stage.
It’s the sort of film Miramax used to make decades ago – high tone, well done, thoughtful entertainment designed to make its audiences feel smarter leaving the cinema than when they came in. Shakespeare in Love, kind of thing. Mescal does the “To be or not to be” speech on the banks of the River Thames, as if Shakespeare himself were wondering if life were really worth living. And ultimately it offers a reassuring message of art as catharsis, healing through theatre.
It’s an emotional pass at the story of Shakespeare and family rather than a rigorously accurate one. No one ever said “Love you” to their kids as they bade them farewell before heading off to London, and this sort of anachronism has ruffled feathers in some quarters. If you would prefer a film that’s more about living inside a completely different ideology, then there is the work of Jessica Hausner – like Amour Fou – to turn to.
This isn’t that sort of film. It is, for all its claims to authenticity, a film about emotion rather than straw and mud. And on that level it completely works.
Hamnet – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
