The jury’s out on popcorn and the case has been made against phone use (time to criminalise?), but where do we stand on big, ugly, drenching-the-cinema-floor sobbing? Chloé Zhao’s (Nomadland) Tudor tearjerker makes the debate suddenly germane. ‘Take tissues’ is a hopeless cliché. Tissues won’t do. You’ll need towels.
With Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal delivering the performances of their careers, Hamnet tells the story behind Shakespeare’s great tragedy – Hamlet – and much more besides. The wild power of motherhood; the fearsome responsibility of parenting; the jolting anxiety of nurturing something precious in a time of death; the drive for creative expression. Zhao holds all these primal but relatable forces in check before unleashing them in an emotionally totalising final reel.
Devotees of Maggie O'Farrell’s 2020 novel, a deeper dive, of course, into the deep wells of bewitching force-of-nature Agnes Hathaway (Buckley) and her genius-in-the-making husband William Shakespeare (Mescal), will be reassured that the author has collaborated with Zhao for an adaptation that’s the right kind of lean. Gone are narrative curlicues that enrich on the page but would clutter on screen: early dating strife; Shakespeare’s journeys to London; the establishment of The Globe; a whole flea-cam interlude that follows the plague carrier from Asia to Stratford-upon-Avon and would look awesome in a David Cronenberg film. Hamnet is a movie that finds power in simplicity.
And Zhao trusts that we’ve seen enough of Elizabethan England to understand that this union between bookish scribe and earthy wild child would unsettle William’s parents, the doughty Mary Shakespeare (Emily Watson) and bullying glove maker John (The Guard’s David Wilmot). William is expected to follow his dad into glove-making, but was somehow born with poetry in his veins. Agnes is blessed with the power to read people through touch. Only her yeoman brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) grasps their miraculous connection.
Tissues won’t do. You’ll need towels
What Agnes can’t foresee, of course, is the plague that will arrive at their door and infect their twins Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), leaving only older daughter Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) untouched. Hamnet, as the opening credits explain, is the same name as ‘Hamlet’ and like a fragile bird in a forest thicket, his fate will become entwined with his father’s greatest play.
To say more would rob the film’s extraordinary final act of some of its might. Except to mention that Jacobi Jupe’s own older brother Noah, once A Quiet Place’s mop-topped mite, plays Hamlet on stage, another note of poignancy the movie hardly needs.
And from Max Richter’s ethereal score to Malgosia Turzanska’s costumes to production designer Fiona Crombie’s lived-in world-building and Lukasz Zal’s measured cinematography, Zhao’s collaborators elevate and enrich the experience.
Like Nomadland, another film that maps out rocky terrain with impressionistic grace, Hamnet is a deep-felt ode to loss and resilience. Zhao doesn’t just tell you about the healing power of art, she shows you. Prepare your tear ducts accordingly.
In US theaters Nov 27. In UK and Ireland cinemas Jan 9, 2026.