Do men grieve differently from women, or do they simply show it differently—which is to say, sometimes, not at all? Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet is a story about familial love and grief, and if you don’t want to know more about it beyond that—and if you haven’t read the 2020 novel it’s based on, by Maggie O’Farrell—it’s best to stop reading here. In the months since Hamnet premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, it has gained a reputation as the movie guaranteed to make you cry—but if it doesn’t, don’t beat yourself up. Movies that make you—or me, or anyone—cry are tricky business. Tears aren’t indicators of a film’s quality. In fact, they’re wholly subjective indicators of feeling. While watching Hamnet, I didn’t cry at the moments I was supposed to—you’ll know when they hit. Instead, I felt empathy for the character played by the performer who was doing the least-visible acting, and it wasn’t Jessie Buckley.
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Buckley is the star and center of Hamnet, set in late 16th and early 17th century Stratford, England. She plays Agnes, who, as the movie opens, is a young woman living with the family that long ago adopted her as an orphan. But Agnes is a misfit in this clan. Her birth mother, as we learn, was a witch, a woman who just “sees things others don’t,” and she has passed this gift of knowing down to her daughter. (“It’s said the girl’s the child of a forest witch,” one character tells us helpfully, in case we haven’t gotten the idea.) Agnes has a pet hawk, a feisty bird with a discriminating eye; she spends a great deal of time in the woods, a place of interlaced tree boughs and magical clearings, finding curative roots and herbs. Her independence is a point of pride for her, until she meets a stammering swain, Paul Mescal’s William, the son of an ill-tempered, debt-ridden glovemaker, who woos her into handfasting territory.
The two make love out of wedlock and conceive a child, angering Agnes’ adoptive family, though her brother, Joe Alwyn’s Bartholomew, who’d been adopted along with her, stands by her side. Agnes and William marry; his stern mother (played by Emily Watson), has grudgingly accepted Agnes, though she has very strict ideas about how things ought to be done. Agnes goes off to the woods to give birth, alone, while wearing a red woolen dress; the baby comes as she sprawls between some gigantic tree roots. It’s the most decorous forest birth ever.
Agnes loves her life, caring for her child and gathering herbs-and-stuff. But William has become surly and distant, and he drinks too much. He also hates working for his tyrant father. So she sends him off to London, where he finds work making gloves for a theater troupe; he returns to visit, seemingly miraculously cured. More children are conceived, twins this time, though Agnes’ mother-in-law insist they be born at home this time, with a midwife in attendance. Agnes hates this idea, but she’s too weak to fight. She has also had a premonition that worries her. But the twin babies grow into smart, cutie-pie mites—their names are Judith and Hamnet, and they’re played by Olivia Lynes and Jacobi Jupe—and even though William is away for long stretches, the family’s life generally improves. William adores his twins, becoming the kind of father he wishes he’d had; he’s particularly fond of little Hamnet, schooling him in swordplay and other theatrical arts.
All of this is preamble to the movie’s real drama: the Bubonic plague takes Hamnet, and both of his parents, understandably, fall apart. Agnes becomes listless and distant. William goes off and works out his feelings by writing a play that will endure for centuries—because (spoiler alert!) he’s really you-know-who, and we’ve been told, in a title card at the start of the movie, that Hamlet is a variation of the name Hamnet.
By this point, Hamnet’s tear-jearking apparatus is in full swing. Buckley can be a wonderful actress—her crooked smile, like a tipsy half-moon, is nothing less than a marvel. But the woodhewn preciousness of Hamnet undermines her. In a moment of what should be extreme emotional agony, Enya-style music tootles in the background, like a signal to the faeries that it’s OK to alight and sprinkle their sad fistfuls of dust. Zhao doesn’t know how to take a less-is-more approach: there’s one crucial moment when Buckley’s face could tell us everything we need to know, but lest we fail to get the memo, her emotions need to be punctuated with an agonized scream. Hamnet is gorgeous to look at, but in a fussed-over way. It’s nice to see Vermeer-style light hitting a rough woolen tunic just so, but really, where does it get us?
It’s Mescal who gives the movie’s surprise stealth performance. In the movie’s early scenes, while Buckley’s Agnes is busy tossing her hair in witch-of-the-woods fashion, his William is a truly believable lovestruck dum-dum. Agnes has introduced him to her spicy hawk; later, he shows up to interrupt one of her pensive woodland walks with a little gift, a falconer’s glove he’s made for her. “I have a glove,” she says drily, and in a blink he flings his rejected offering over his shoulder. It’s a small, gorgeous, throwaway moment in a movie full of big beats masquerading as tender and intimate ones.
And somehow, though a mother’s grief has got to be the most piercing emotion in the world, what Mescal tells us about a man’s grief ends up having more weight. William is bound up tight; he can’t talk about his feelings or even think about them. All he can do is write a play. When Hamlet is finally performed, on that rough wooden stage, it’s Noah Jupe—the fantastic young actor who may be best known for the Quiet Place movies, though he’s even better as an aspiring teenage pop star in 2022’s Dreamin’ Wild—in the title role. (The young actor who plays Hamnet is Noah’s little brother.) Earlier, we’ve seen Mescal’s William directing this young Hamlet with an almost cruel ruthlessness. The stammering fledgling performer can’t get the lines right—he can’t get them as William hears them in his brain, and his heart. Mescal shows us what it’s like for a man to be dying inside, without overtly showing us anything at all. You can’t depict emptiness; it’s a void with no borders. Instead, Mescal gives us the kind of suffering that has seeped into your bones, only to find it has nowhere else to go.
Hamnet is a movie based on a clever conceit, and some history: though O’Farrell’s book is a novel, it’s grounded in real life. William Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, did lose a son named Hamnet, age 11, in 1596. O’Farrell’s story takes facts and spins a “what if” narrative around them, focusing more on the mystery of what Hathaway’s life might have been like, and on the pain she must have suffered upon the death of her child. It’s true that in the writing of history, women’s lives—particularly their inner lives—don’t get the same attention that men’s exploits do. But in this movie version of Hamnet, it’s the man who works the most dazzling witchcraft, turning his sorrow into something heavier than lead and lighter than air. Mescal gives us a William, so clever with words, who’s trapped in his own riddle. That’s what inescapable grief must feel like.