Review of Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I feel like a lot of my blog introductions, especially when it comes to movies, have been lamenting on the fact I don’t have a ton of time lately. I used to work as a film critic (which, in fact, was so incredibly underpaid that I now make more off of this blog’s display ads than I ever did publishing anywhere else), and then when I was in graduate school I was writing a lot about film, so I used to watch so many movies.

But now I work an 8-5, come home, and then doom scroll my evenings away instead of watching the movies I used to love so dearly. And recently I realized I want to stop doing that, so I’ve set limits on my phone and am fully prepared to sit back and watch more movies and read more books in order to feed my brain.

Hamnet is actually a movie I wanted to see in theaters, but for some reason my local theater only showed it for a couple of days before ultimately pulling it in favor of whatever blockbuster was showing at the time. Then when they brought it back for Oscars showings, it was at like 1 PM on a work day.

So when my local library branch ended up stocking Hamnet DVD copies, you bet I jumped on that train and waited patiently for my turn on the waitlist. Turns out that people watch movies a lot quicker than books, as I got through the waitlist pretty quickly.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much right now.

The story of Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, and the grief she felt after losing her son to the bubonic plague.

This movie starts with introducing the concept that in England at this time, Hamnet and Hamlet were actually the same name. We then meet Agnes before she was married. She summons a hawk with her glove, that is known in her family, and gathers herbs in the woods.

William Shakespeare lives in town and works as a tutor, but one day he spots Agnes and falls in love immediately. Despite his mother’s warnings that she’s the daughter of a witch according to the local village lore, he continues to see Agnes. She ends up treating him with the same herbal medicine she grew up learning about.

One day they’re both in the woods when Agnes asks William to tell her a story. He ends up telling the story of Eurydice and Orpheus, then she reads his palm. She says she sees him being successful and them having two kids by the time she dies, then they have sex.

Agnes gets pregnant from this and her family disowns her. She moves in with the Shakespeares and they marry not much later. Agnes then gives birth to their first daughter, but when William’s father begins pressuring him to get a job, Agnes convinces his brother to send William to London to pursue a theater career.

She gives birth again not long later. She tries to give birth in the woods, by the river, like when she had her daughter Susanna, but William’s family stops her. They have her give birth in the home, and she has Hamnet, then Judith. But when Judith comes out, they presume her to be dead.

Agnes has a flashback to when she was forced away from her mother’s deathbed, then demands the baby be given to her. Judith then wakes up and is alive. We have a time jump after that: William is now successful in the theater world and the kids are all very happy and teenagers.

He comes home every so often, and this time the twins pretend to be each other in an attempt to trick him. During this visit Agnes’s hawk passes away and they bury it as a family, with her teaching the kids how to make a wish to the hawk’s spirit. William returns to London and watches a puppet show about the bubonic plague.

Back in Stratford, Judith gets the plague and Hamnet finds her ill in her bed. Everyone does their best to take care of her, but when everyone is gone from the room, Hamnet slips into bed right next to her and tells her a story about the hawk, declaring that he will trick death and take her place.

Judith wakes up much better, but then Hamnet contracts the plague and passes away. As he lays dying, he stands alone on a stage, calling for his mother, as her hawk comes to greet him. William returns to find te family mourning over his body.

The Shakespeares now have to learn to live without Hamnet. William buys a large home for them to live in, and when Agnes holds his hand and reads it, she says she can no longer see anything. He returns to London to rehearse Hamlet, but is unable to connect with his cast. He lets out his agony by reciting the famous “To be” monologue from the play.

Back in Stratford Agnes’s stepmother pulls out a Hamlet playbill and rebukes the fact Agnes married her, but Agnes defends her husband. Agnes heads to London with William’s brother to see William, but he’s not home. They end up at the first performance of the play, which Agnes is offended by her son’s name being used, then she realizes, after seeing William as the ghost, that this is about Hamnet.

William starts sobbing backstage when he sees her there. The play continues on, and as Hamlet is killed on stage, she reaches for his had. She sees Hamnet there in front of her, and he smiles at her before moving backstage. She then laughs and smiles for the first time since he passed away.

Overall Thoughts

This is a bit of a slow movie, as it’s all about the characters and their journey, but man is it worth the slow pace. The first half of the movie takes place setting up the moment of Hamnet’s death, and the actors do a marvelous job of transitioning from that space of delighted elation into mind-numbing grief.

I feel it’s important to mention that I never read the book before going into this movie, nor did I know the plot beyond the basics, but I enjoyed this film a lot. Not only is it gorgeously filmed, but it also ends up being an experience that goes beyond its time period and national borders.

I also was unfamiliar with the play being a metaphor for William’s own experiences theory, as I’m not someone who really studied Shakespeare lore. But this was a fascinating rabbit hole to dive deeper into after the fact, too.

All of this is to say: go see this if you haven’t already. I wish I saw it in theaters, but this is a movie that is truly meant to be seen on a screen—and not just read about on the Internet!

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