Chloé Zhao swung big with her latest film, Hamnet, and honestly? It pays off. Yeah, the story has a couple soft spots and a few visual choices pulled me out of the moment, but the acting holds everything together. This cast is stacked, and when performances hit this hard, those other bumps fade into the background.
Acting: The Best Part of the Movie
Jessie Buckley, as Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare and mother to Hamnet (who he based Hamlet on), is just fantastic. The level of precision she brings to this role. Line by line. Expression by expression. Breath by breath. There’s an intensity to her performance. It turns a great role into something magnetic, and I’m not shy about saying that she’s Oscar-worthy here.
Paul Mescal, as Shakespeare, is also good. I don’t know if I would call his performance award-worthy. I don’t think he was given enough material to do that, but he also never lets on that he’s struggling in a script that doesn’t do the best job of supporting him. To me, this isn’t his story, and the script is very clear on that.
The other part of the family is Hamnet, played by Jacobi Jupe. I love when filmmakers cast young actors in key roles, and they continue to impress me more and more. He’s strong. He’s relatable. He’s vulnerable. He’s everything you need from this kind of role. He carries an emotional heft that the rest of the movie needed.
There’s not a weak link in this cast, but it’s Buckley that shines the brightest.
The Story: Distracted by Expectations
So yeah, I was expecting one kind of film when I went into this, and I left having seen something very different. The trailers are misleading. There’s a good half of the movie that suggests that Hamlet and Shakespeare and Hamnet are going to be central to this, when, in fact, they are not.
Instead, the focus is entirely on Agnes. It’s her story. The story is Shakespeare’s in the sense that it follows his life and career, but it’s all centered on her. We see the world through her eyes. We experience the grief and loss and mysticism and sorrow and power through her. The whole movie is her, and that’s not what I expected. That’s not what the trailers had led me to believe.
The result is that, as much as I enjoyed it, the story didn’t land with me. There were times I got it, but the execution was just a little thin. Zhao leans into this mystical, mythological side of things, which is a natural choice given the Shakespeare side of things, but it wasn’t what I was expecting from the trailers, and the adjustment left me jarred.
I don’t want to beat this too hard. There are a lot of elements in this film that I really enjoyed. Zhao’s story feels sprawling, ambitious. But it just fell short for me in places. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. I wish it had been. I’m a sucker for a Shakespeare retelling, and this had that in spades. I was here for it.
Photography: Stunning, Until It Weren’t
Speaking of Shakespearian retellings. Let’s talk about the visual side of this film.
There’s a number of scenes here that got me on a technical level. Amazing shots. Amazing use of the canvas we were given.
But then there were other sections that relied too heavily on certain visual cues. Wide angles. Showing us an action from an odd distance. Characters moving in and out of the frame as the camera focuses elsewhere, and we’re not even sure what’s happening half the time. I feel like some of these techniques were used to make this more Shakespearean than it really was, and that worked against itself in the long run. Not because it’s “bad” or distracting. I get it. This is an approach to a style. But I just found myself noticing it, and it pulled me away from what was happening on the screen instead of drawing me in further.
Final Thoughts: Great 4 out of 5
I really enjoyed Hamnet. Four out of five stars. Almost all of that is due to Jessie Buckley’s performance. She kept me engaged the whole time. She was the lynchpin that made this movie work for me, and if I was ever unsure, I could just focus on her and remind myself of just how powerful this film could be because of her.
Worth the watch. If you’re at all curious, if you’re a fan of Zhao’s work, if Shakespeare or Agnes are your jam, check this one out and see if it works for you like it did for me.
