Hamnet

Saturday March 7 @ 7 pm

Biography / Drama / History / Romance
PG – 2hr 5min

From Academy Award® winning writer/director Chloé Zhao, Hamnet tells the powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet. Breaking hearts and mending them in one fell swoop, Hamnet speculates on the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s masterpiece with palpable emotional force thanks to Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal’s astonishing performances. This adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel is earthy, soaring, profound and life-affirming.

Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet imagined the relationship between the Bard and his spouse as an intimate tale of lust, compromise, joy, resentment, support, and sorrow. A marriage, in other words. It also focuses on one of the defining events of their lives, the death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet, and how that unfathomable loss leads William to write the tale of a melancholy Dane in an existential crisis. The play takes their boy’s name as its title — Hamnet and Hamlet being virtually synonymous — and secures Shakespeare‘s legacy. O’Farrell imagined a speculative fiction that nonetheless grounded the story of a famous historical couple in the reality of both love’s labor and a sense of loss. Even the man who wrote eloquent romantic soliloquies that have endured centuries still royally pissed off his wife on the regular.

What makes Chloé Zhao’s films so special is the way they convey nature’s transcendent quality. From The Rider to her Oscar-winning Nomadland and even her unloved Marvel blockbuster Eternals, they find the mystical within our everyday surroundings, making the prosaic feel profound.  That aesthetic instinct is the best part of Hamnet, Zhao’s wildly hyped fifth film. The fictionalized story of how William Shakespeare and his wife worked through the loss of their son has been overwhelming festival audiences with emotion, leaving viewers and critics alike in puddles of sobs. Jessie Buckley’s performance in particular has inspired effusive praise for its raw intensity.

There isn’t an ounce or moment of pretension in Hamnet. There are no bloated scenes, nothing added for superfluous effect. Zhao is organic in her filmmaking, giving the audience only essentials. The raw portrayal of grief by Buckley and Mescal is so effective it’s transferable across the screen. Buckley is an actor with limitless range. We have seen her do comedy in Wicked Little Letters, sing and perform in Wild Rose and a variety of other dramatic roles in the last few years. Her performing style is ferocious by nature, and her portrayal of Agnes is as intense as any motherly figure captured on screen this century. Following last years All of Us Strangers and this years’ A History of Sound, Mescal is the go-to thespian for grief. Mescal’s “bursting at the seams” portrait of restrained mourning is a profound work of tearjerking art.

Without spoiling the film’s incredible final, extended sequence, what Buckley does in it is truly remarkable. After the terrible ordeal Agnes has experienced, which has brought her family to the brink, she witnesses something that opens a whole new window of understanding. The actress becomes so purely reactive, her instrument resonating with each tiny new revelation, that we can’t help but trace her flood of new thoughts, feel her overwhelming new feelings. The purity of her state of discovery casts an irresistible spell. What Buckley achieves is something rare. Attention must be paid.

There’s no doubt that, in many people’s eyes, Hamnet will be one of the films of the year. Swept along on a wave of adoring reviews, it’s sure to land on dozens of “best of 2025” lists, and on thousands of Oscar ballots. From the earthy groundedness of Fiona Crombie’s production design to cinematographer Łukasz Żal’s warm images that effortlessly move from metaphorical formalism to hand-held urgency; from Maximilian Behrens’ immersive soundscape in tandem with Max Richter’s gorgeous score to an entire cast resonating like strings speaking in sympathy – all virtuosically conducted by Zhao – Hamnet is a technical, artistic, intellectual, and emotional feast. Don’t miss it.