Hamnet

The Grammar of Grief

In the cinema of Chloé Zhao, the landscape is never merely a backdrop; it is a sentient participant, a vast, indifferent witness to human fragility. From the windswept badlands of *The Rider* to the transient American West of *Nomadland*, Zhao has always been drawn to characters who are untethered, living in the margins where civilization frays into the wild. With *Hamnet*, her adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s celebrated novel, she applies this same earthy, tactile lens to the sixteenth century. The result is a period piece that feels less like a historical reenactment and more like a fever dream of mud, feathers, and silence. It is not a film about the "Bard of Avon"; it is a film about the cost of being human when the world is cruel enough to take your child.

Zhao’s visual language here is a rejection of the polished, sterile aesthetic often associated with Tudor dramas. There are no stiff ruffs or pristine corridors. Instead, cinematographer Łukasz Żal captures a world of "filthy fingernails" realism, where the camera lingers on the textures of beeswax, damp wool, and the rough bark of trees. The film’s opening hour, detailing the courtship of the young Latin tutor (Paul Mescal) and the forest-dwelling herbalist Agnes (Jessie Buckley), is steeped in a Malickian reverence for the natural world. Their love is not conveyed through Shakespearean soliloquies—which Mescal’s character has not yet written—but through a shared, quiet understanding of the earth. They are creatures of their environment, and Zhao films them as such, framing their bodies against the sun and the soil, grounding the myth of "Shakespeare" in the sweaty, desperate reality of a struggling young couple.

But the film’s true weight settles in its second half, with the arrival of the bubonic plague. Here, the narrative pivots from romance to a suffocating study of loss. The death of eleven-year-old Hamnet (played with heartbreaking fragility by Jacobi Jupe) is the singularity into which the family collapses. Zhao avoids the melodramatic; instead, she focuses on the domestic geography of sorrow. The scene where Agnes discovers her son’s body is a masterclass in restraint and release. Buckley, whose performance is a raw nerve exposed to the elements, delivers a silent, guttural wail that seems to rip through the screen. It is a moment of pure, unadulterated devastation that anchors the film, reminding us that before *Hamlet* was a play, Hamnet was a boy.

The brilliance of *Hamnet* lies in how it navigates the chasm between private grief and public art. The "Ghost" that haunts the film is not the one on the battlements of Elsinore, but the absence at the dinner table. When the film finally travels to London for the staging of the play, Zhao resists the urge to make it a triumph. The premiere of *Hamlet* is not depicted as a glorious arrival, but as a painful exorcism. As Agnes watches her husband on stage, playing the Ghost of the father to an actor (Noah Jupe) who bears her dead son’s name, the film achieves a profound synthesis. We see the alchemy of grief: how a father’s inability to save his son is transmuted into a prince’s inability to save his father.

Ultimately, *Hamnet* is a testament to the idea that art is not a cure for pain, but a vessel for it. Zhao has stripped away the icon to reveal the man, and more importantly, the woman beside him, whose own wild magic was the soil from which his genius grew. It is a film that demands we sit with the silence that follows the applause, in the spaces where the people we love used to be.