You’d watch Hamnet for the visuals alone, director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal flooding the screen with lush greens and browns, 16th century rural England brought to physical life with an eye-popping attention to detail. We first meet Jessie Buckley’s Agnes in dense woodland gathering plants, a gift for falconry signalling her otherness. Though the locals whisper that she’s the daughter of a witch, she proves irresistible to glove maker and Latin tutor William (Paul Mescal). He charms her with his storytelling abilities and she reciprocates by reading his palm, hinting at a successful future.
Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel, its screenplay co-written by her and Zhao, Hamnet is most endearing when depicting the mundane: the messiness and sheer slog of bringing up three children in a house that's too small, the frustrations of having a job that you hate. Agnes and William marry against her family’s wishes, their firstborn daughter Susannah followed by twins Judith and Hamnet, the former seemingly stillborn and but revived when Agnes holds her.
Buckley and Mescal always convince as onscreen couple and Zhao draws superb performances from her three child actors. William, mocked by his father (David Wilmot) for being “useless, tradeless”, rejects a future as a glove maker and is encouraged by Agnes’ brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) to pursue a writing career in London. Agnes effectively becomes a single parent, William returning home intermittently as his success grows.
One of this Blu-ray’s extras includes a fleeting appearance from co-producer Steven Spielberg, commenting on Hamnet’s striking mixture of “tragedy and joy”. This can make for gruelling viewing, a wonderful sequence showing the couple’s children giving Agnes a sneak preview of the witches’ first scene in Macbeth contrasting bitterly with the tragic event at the film’s heart. It’s a real gut-punch, the main characters’ differing responses to it subsequently examined. William returns to London and throws himself into work, Agnes left behind to pick up the pieces, newly installed in a large house in Stratford.
Though largely mute, Buckley is phenomenal in the final act, one of several hundred spectators in a brilliantly recreated Globe Theatre watching the first performance of her husband’s latest play. O’Farrell and Zhao’s vivid demonstration of the power of great art’s ability to heal and console is affecting, Buckley’s face and eyes alone showing us exactly what Agnes is going through. Which makes it doubly irritating to have Max Richter’s banal “On the Nature of Daylight” blasting out on the soundtrack just at the point when we’re craving silence and space.
That misstep apart, Hamnet stands out as an unusually thoughtful and literate mainstream release, handsomely shot and well acted. The Blu-ray includes a commentary from Zhao and three short bonus features. The care with which Tudor England was recreated is remarkable, even down to the dyes used to make the costumes look right, and we see Zhao getting cast and crew to de-stress after an intense week’s shooting by having them dance around the set. You might need to decompress after watching Hamnet, so I’d suggest taking a look at Richard Bracewell’s joyous 2015 romp Bill, a sweet and irreverent look at Shakespeare’s "lost years" which is still available to view on BBC iPlayer.
