“The winner of TIFF’s coveted People’s Choice Award, Hamnet is Chloé Zhao’s stunning adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, itself drawn from a well of history and legend. Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley are undeniable as William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, who soon form a joyful family of five—only for their son, Hamnet, to succumb to the bubonic plague in his early years. Together, Zhao, Mescal, Buckley, and their fellow actors take a story that has become borderline mythological in history books—the making of Shakespeare’s masterwork, Hamlet—and infuse it with intimacy. Hamnet focuses most intently on Buckley’s Agnes: Her spirit, her grief, her resentment, and her fortitude, particularly as she and her husband languish in their separate clouds of agony, provide the film with its bedrock. It is only when Agnes learns of William’s latest play, Hamlet, that the veil between life and death is finally breached. Zhao’s latest film is assured and virtuosic—sad, yes, but never just sad.”—Lauren Puckett-Pope, staff culture writer
In theaters November 27.
