Hamnet review: not a dry eye in the house

‘What’s in a name?’ the doomed Juliet asks Romeo in a little play by William Shakespeare you may have heard of?

Though a different fragment of that text appears in Chloé Zhao’s England-set Hamnet, which just closed the British Film Festival before opening nationally on 15 January, the idea of nominative determinism howls through this heartsore film like wind in the woods.

Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s historical fiction of the same name, with the author as co-writer, Hamnet underlines that names matter. They tie us to our families, for better or worse, sometimes saddling us with fates beyond our control. All have layers of deeper meaning.

So there’s a chill in the air, as an opening intertitle announces that, during the 16^th century, given names were often interchangeable.

Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son – played by Jacobi Jupe, and what a name that is! – was just as commonly spelled Hamlet. An ominous echo of the portentous Prince of Denmark to come from Will’s pen, borrowed from Viking tales of Amleth. Shakespeare is played here by The History of Sound star Paul Mescal.

Hamnet’s mother’s name also has its mirror image: both Anne and Agnes Hathaway. With the mighty Jessie Buckley magnetic in the role, we first spy her curled up in a tree root’s nook. Wrapped in a blood-red dress, she’s like a pomegranate seed freshly planted.

Hailing from a long line of witchy women who stride, like elemental nymphs, out of the forest to claim their lover, Agnes can tell fortunes with the clasp of her thumb in the crook of another’s.

While the facts surrounding Shakespeare’s family are fuzzy, this wild and unruly twist is O’Farrell’s, casting a heady spell over the novel and film. Drawing deep on auld magic, Zhao lends the tragedy an inescapable destiny, with a whisper of folkloric horror shivering in the green places and dark spaces of that gnarled trunk’s hollow.

Hamnet: a hawk from a handsaw

Inescapable tendrils ensnarl Agnes and Will even as they tumble, intertwined. He first glimpses her communion with the ferocious, swooping hawk that is her familiar. Mescal, a subtle actor, brings an endearingly goofy shyness to his halting approaches.

Will’s been summoned to the Hathaway home to tutor her half-brothers in Latin, to pay off the debts of his lousy glover father, John (David Wilmot). A task the Bard-to-be somewhat snootily sees as wasted effort, given they’re farmhands.

Buckley imbues Agnes with the feral energy she demonstrated in Michael Pearce’s Beast, beguiling Will with her old lore of plants and potions, even as she gently rebuffs his advances. As he approaches her territorial bird and suffers only the mildest of nips, those walls come down.

The mythological takes hold, as Agnes insists Will share a story he feels deeply in his heart. Quite why he would opt for the catastrophe of impatient Orpheus and the twice-damned Eurydice, Zeus only knows. As omens go, this meet-cute does not bode well. Nor does Agne’s scrying, in the webbed skin of his hand, that only two children will stand over her deathbed.

The first, Bodhi Rae Breathnach’s Susanna, arrives shortly thereafter. Agnes and Will are hastily married, with the latter returning to the woods alone to birth their first daughter in the dirt and leaves.

While Agnes’ ways are deeply understood and supported by her tender brother, Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), they’re a dangerous indulgence in the eyes of Will’s mother, Mary (Emily Watson, always impeccable at playing imperious).

She holds Agnes against her will when it comes to having the twins that follow, Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet. Denied the woods, Agnes cries in vain to be set free, the riverbank bursts and dark waters creep ominously under their door. A flood that bears no goodwill.

Agnes understands that Stratford will smother the flame of budding playwright and poet Will if he remains here in the swaying grass, freely encouraging him to embrace theatrical life in London while she holds fort at home.

Returning sporadically, his words take flight in the mouths of their babes. Donning busted baskets, tattered cloth and weedy wreaths as dramatic masks, the children playfully depict the Weird Sisters’ cauldron bubble speech. There’s ancient power coursing through the number three, surely, but as with Macbeth’s prophetic curse, only half-glimpsed, the future Agnes envisions for them does not tally.

Hamnet: a confession in your looks

Hamnet is sumptuously of its time, aided in no small part by Australian production designer Fiona Crombie’s remarkable eye for detail, previously spied on The Favourite.

She’s abetted by The Green Knight costume designer Malgosia Turzanska’s gloriously textural work with leather, wool and linen, captured in tactile fashion by cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who delivered some of this century’s finest work in Cold War.

Likewise, Johnnie Burn’s intensely layered sound design, carrying over the hyper-specificity of thought and feeling baked into the background of The Zone of Interest, also lulls us with its iambic pentameter-adopting rhythms. If Max Richter’s astonishing score feels a little underused, it’s a minor niggle in a film that purposefully allows plenty of room for silence.

Zhao’s Hamnet also feels refreshingly modern, tethered as if by a horse’s leash to The Rider, her truth-borrowing fiction that leant closer to documentary. Hamnet may wear O’Farrell’s dramatic flourishes, but the films nevertheless share a distinct grounding in the real.

Also contemporary-feeling is the push-and-pull of the central partnership, with Anges so disturbed by Will’s alcohol-fuelled late-night writing frustrations that she encourages him to do his own thing. Then her quiet seething at his absence when death’s cruel hand comes scratching at their door.

A plague on both their houses enacts a twisted reflection of Judith and Hamnet’s childhood glee in pretending to be one another. A terrible bargain is made, and an impossible cost paid, with Jupe and Lynes wise beyond their years in these awful scenes, as is  Breathnach, lingering in another mirror, this time of Anges’ lost mother.

Hamnet: I know not ‘seems’

As with most Shakespeare plays, Hamlet’s dating is not precise, though it’s likely comedies bowed before it at the Globe Theatre after Hamnet’s death. A possible truth signalled by a bittersweet joke, near the film’s sublime conclusion.

But the truth’s on the page. All roads lead to a false Denmark by the Thames, where Agnes’ beloved trees are now daubed on the stage backdrop, an emerald fire of hope in this miserably blue and sooty London.

Jupe’s older brother, Noah, maximises a remarkable cameo alongside Mescal’s broken Bard, who, in O’Farrell and now Zhao’s reading, has poured his misery into the play’s to be or not to be – that too-cruel coin toss – and wears a dead man’s cloak on stage.

Turn back, Will cannot, but his Eurydice returns. Buckley blisters and cracks our souls in this final act, with no amount of onscreen audience shooshing preventing eyes wet with tears that flow beyond the veil in Zhao’s triumph.

‘Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’

Hamnet is released in Australian cinemas on 15 January 2026.

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Format: Film

Country: 4444598584563

Release: January 15

Available: Cinemas

Hamnet review: not a dry eye in the house