My quick rating - 7.7/10. I realized March 15th is coming soon, and I would like to get all the Best Picture nominees in so I can make more educated picks for the Oscar Contest. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet opens with a title card explaining that in Elizabethan England, “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were interchangeable due to the era’s creative relationship with spelling. It’s a small detail and not just historical trivia. It’s part of the backbone of the film.
After her eleven-year-old son dies during the plague, Agnes Shakespeare (Jessie Buckley) is shattered. Her husband William (Paul Mescal) mourns too, but in a very different way. She is the wound exposed. He is the scar forming quietly underneath clothing. All of this takes place in the unforgiving landscape of 16th-century England. The film follows Agnes, a healer who can mend others but not herself. She attempts to navigate grief while still being a wife and mother to her surviving children.
Let’s get this out of the way. You already know this story is going to hurt. The plague doesn’t exactly scream “feel-good matinee.” But what makes Hamnet devastating isn’t just the tragedy, it’s how convincingly it’s performed. The acting here is on another level. Buckley delivers a performance that feels less like acting and more like a mental excavation. When that moment of realization hits her during the stage performance of Hamlet, the entire range of emotion she cycles through is staggering. It’s raw, unfiltered grief. Agnes doesn’t romanticize her pain. She wears it like armor made of broken glass.
Mescal plays Will as a man who buries his sorrow so deep it comes back out as poetry. Their dynamic is painfully believable. One partner imploding, the other transmuting loss into language. You can practically see the creative gears turning behind his eyes while hers remain flooded.
The supporting cast is equally strong. Bodhi Rae Breathnach as Susanna, the eldest child, brings a quiet resilience to her scenes. I had just seen her in Shelter, and she continues to impress. Noah Jupe, playing the stage version of Hamlet, again had my full attention, as he did in The Carpenter’s Son. The theater sequence with Agnes in the audience is one of the film’s most powerful moments. Grief meeting art in real time.
I thought Hamnet was visually stunning. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal deserves major credit for creating an atmosphere that feels authentically lived-in rather than museum-polished. There’s mud, candlelight, and damp air. You can almost smell the 1500s (which, I'd be willing to bet, wasn’t pleasant).
If there’s a drawback, it’s the pacing. The film moves deliberately, sometimes very deliberately. It slows down to force you to sit in the grief, to feel its corrosive weight. There’s no swelling musical cue to soften the blow. Sadness here isn’t poetic. It’s damaging and relentless, without a cure in sight.
Go figure. A movie about the Shakespeare family delivers some of the best acting of the year. Don’t be surprised if you don’t make it through dry-eyed. It may not be my Best Picture pick (I’ve still got two contenders left to watch), but in terms of performances? This one’s setting the bar uncomfortably high.
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