Filmmaker Chloé Zhao Finds the Human Pulse in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By Laurence Lerman / New York City

Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal play Agnes and William Shakespeare in Hamnet

SCREEN TIME

For a filmmaker as soft-spoken as Chloé Zhao, silence can be its own kind of announcement. After the multiplex gigantism of Zhao’s 2021 The Eternals—a film that felt at times like it was trying to bend a Marvel colossus back into the shape of her Oscar-winning 2020 Nomadland—Zhao retreated from the spotlight for a full four years. No festivals, no features, no op-eds about the state of cinema. Just a long, quiet absence, the kind that’s inviting if you’re Shakespeare, suspicious if you’re a Hollywood director, and kind of tantalizing if you’re both.

Now, with Hamnet, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August to standing ovations and tearful critics, Zhao has returned not with a roar but with a an artfully haunted tremor.

Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed 2020 novel, Hamnet is neither a biopic, nor a rehashing of Elizabethan lore, nor even a story primarily about William Shakespeare. Rather, it’s a fictionalized examination of the emotional journey of the women and children  who lived on the borderline  of genius and suffered in its shadow.

Paul Mescal, as Shakespeare, tends to his young son Hamnet

The film follows Agnes (Jessie Buckley), the birth name of Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway, as she navigates a marriage to a brilliant but often absent husband (Paul Mescal, playing Shakespeare as both luminous and frustrating), and the brief, bright life of their son, Hamnet (newcomer Kit Rowe). From the start, Hamnet announces itself as a film less interested in Elizabethan England than in universal grief—what it means to lose a child and then to attempt to shape art around that loss.

Zhao’s signature filmmaking language—lyrical wide shots, unvarnished faces, sunlight as emotional punctuation—sits beautifully atop O’Farrell’s story. The two co-wrote the script, and the result feels like a collaboration of mutual artistic DNA. The film’s structure moves in more linear fashion than O’Farrell’s chronologically splintered, memory-driven novel, a narrative approach that clearly works well.

Jessie Buckley takes it to the stage

Buckley gives her finest performance yet—fierce, sensual, superstitious, and magnetic. Agnes, in her rendering, is not a muse but a force, someone deeply rooted in the textures of the natural world: herbs, honey, animal bones, the porous boundary between the living and the dead. Zhao shoots her with a mixture of reverence and documentary realism. It’s the kind of performance that doesn’t strain for awards attention but inevitably attracts it.

Mescal’s Shakespeare is deliberately secondary, often shown from the edges of the frame. Zhao has no interest in enshrining him as the center of the universe; she treats him instead as a prodigiously gifted man who cannot always live in the world he writes about. Mescal plays the part with a soulful guardedness—he’s a husband who loves Agnes, a father who adores his son, and an artist who is both terrified and dependent on the intensity of his own mind. His scenes with Buckley have the electric chemistry of two people who know each other’s strengths and weaknesses too well.

Emily Watson, as Agnes’s stoic mother, and Joe Alwyn, as Shakespeare’s brittle, judgmental brother, lead the supporting cast with performances that deepen the film without ever distracting from its central tragedy.

Visually, Hamnet is a striking achievement. Working with cinematographer Joshua James Richards once again, Zhao fills the screen with a pastoral England that looks simultaneously ancient and brand new. The landscapes—forests, meadows, the half-timbered claustrophobia of Stratford—are more than just backdrops; they are emotional states. When Hamnet grows sick, the world darkens perceptibly; when Agnes wanders the fields after his death, she seems swallowed by a landscape too wide to hold her grief. Zhao’s camera doesn’t intrude; it observes, allowing performances to bloom and break in their own time.

(from left) Jacobi Jupe (Hamnet), Bodhi Rae Breathnach (Susanna,) and Olivia Lynes (Judith) portray Shakespeare’s three young children

But the film’s final act is where Zhao’s ambitions crystallize. Rather than showing us the writing of Hamlet, she shows us the impossibility of it—the way Shakespeare circles his son’s death like an open wound he simply cannot confront–or ignore. In one remarkable scene, Agnes watches a rehearsal of the play’s early drafts, realizing in real time the haunting gift and betrayal of being turned into art. It’s a fascinating consideration of authorship: who gets to transform pain into beauty, and who must simply survive it.

In the end, Hamnet feels less like a tribute to Shakespeare's greatest tragedy than a quiet, devastating companion to it—a film that reminds us that behind every masterpiece is the life that bled for it. With this return to her independent sensibility following her trip through the Marvel Comics universe, Zhao has crafted one of the year’s richest arthouse releases: intimate in scope, epic in feeling, and unshakeable in resonance.

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Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, a former editor of Video Business--Variety's digital media trade publication—and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his four-decade career, he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major filmmaker working today, from Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood to Kathryn Bigelow, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Werner Herzog. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com, the founder and curator of FilmShul.com, a multi-part presentation on the history of Hollywood and Jewish America, and a commentator on various 4K UHD and Blu-ray home entertainment releases.