A Masterpiece of Love, Loss, and Shakespeare’s Ghost

Chloé Zhao, the Oscar-winning Chinese director, has delivered a profoundly moving masterpiece with Hamnet. This is not a stuffy period drama but a sensuous, deeply felt portrait of a family shattered by grief.

Zhao, working from Maggie O‘Farrell’s novel, proves once again her extraordinary ability to find the universal in the specific, crafting a film that is as much about the healing power of art as it is about loss .

The cast is flawless. As Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, Jessie Buckley gives a performance of raw, primal power. Her grief is not just acted; it’s embodied, from the guttural howl of loss to the quiet, simmering resentment toward a husband who processes pain through his quill.

Paul Mescal is equally compelling as Will, a man who flees his overwhelming sorrow into the burgeoning theatre scene of London, his detachment a quiet devastation of its own .

Beyond the performances, the film is a triumph of craft. Cinematographer Lukasz Zal, known for The Zone of Interest, shoots with a naturalistic, unflashy eye, favoring wide shots that place the characters within their oppressive, often beautiful environments .

Production designer Fiona Crombie builds a tangible world—the Shakespeare home feels genuinely lived-in, a heavy wooden box of domesticity .

The costumes by Malgosia Turzanska are a character study in themselves; Agnes’s bark-textured clothing and Will’s doublets, stained with ink, root them in their world without ever feeling like costume parade .

Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, provides the source material for this extraordinary film .

The book emerged from O’Farrell’s fascination with the scant historical record of William Shakespeare’s family—specifically his son Hamnet, who died at age eleven in 1596, likely of bubonic plague.

O’Farrell made a crucial creative decision that shapes both novel and film: she renames Shakespeare’s wife Anne as Agnes, drawing from a historical variant, and places her at the story’s emotional center rather than relegating her to a footnote.

In O’Farrell’s telling, Agnes emerges as a woman with mysterious gifts—a healer attuned to the natural world who can read people’s natures with a single touch, the daughter of a reputed sorceress .

The novel weaves together the tragic arc of Hamnet’s death with the love story of his parents’ first meeting, exploring how grief can both shatter and ultimately transmute into art .

As O’Farrell herself explained, she wanted “to ask readers to forget everything they think they know about him, and meet this person as a human”—to strip away the literary icon and reveal a father processing unimaginable loss .

Where Zhao’s interpretation soars is in its focus. Unlike other Shakespeare-adjacent films that revel in the glamour of the Globe, Hamnet is anchored in the quiet, muddy reality of Stratford. It is less concerned with the birth of a legend than the death of a child.

The film’s climactic scene, where Agnes witnesses Hamlet for the first time, is a stunning piece of adaptation—she realizes her husband has transmuted their shared agony into art, a moment of reconciliation that feels truly earned .

Audiences include this reviewer were visibly moved at the Hong Kong premiere, with the cinema sitting in hushed silence as the credits rolled.

In the end, Zhao has not just adapted a book; she has given us a new, unforgettable classic about the spaces between people and the art that can fill them.