Hamnet: dazzling Jessie Buckley (review)
The British actress shines in this variation on the creation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet where Chloe Zhao returns to this sensory cinema which constitutes her DNA. A film as beautiful as it is powerful about grief.
Hamnet opens in majesty with a shot in the middle of nature where we discover, nestled at the foot of a tree, its heroine Agnès who, having lost her mother at a very young age, has since found comfort in this immensity, in the middle of the fauna and flora, and whose gift of predicting the future has earned her to be considered a witch. This suspended moment tells both this woman and what the next two hours will be like. The lead of a symphony which will give pride of place to the great and beautiful feelings that Chloe Zhao will embrace head-on without ever being afraid of them and thereby avoiding any slide towards whining pathos. And abandon the contemplative grace of his first works for a more direct and assertive lyricism.
Because this plan is also a signature. We are at the heart of a film by Chloe Zhao, the director discovered exactly ten years ago with The Songs My Brothers Taught Me. This sensory cinema that we also found in the multi-Oscar-winning Nomadland, her gateway to Hollywood, where she further forged this link between femininity and nature. And after the Marvel parenthesis with The Eternals, she accepted a proposal which put her right back into what constitutes her DNA. The adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel and this variation around the creation of Hamlet that the author imagined inspired by the death of her son Hamnet
His film follows the book. A thousand miles from a classic biopic around Shakespeare, it develops a poignant meditation around filiation, mourning and the way in which art can transfigure even the most unbearable pain. But this is first experienced and felt from Agnès’ point of view. The one who married William, son of the glove makers in her village. The one who had three children with him: a daughter Eliza and two twins Hamnet and Judith whom she was on the verge of losing in childbirth. The one who, despite her gifts, will not be able to save Hamnet from the plague who has decided to sacrifice himself by somehow stealing this deadly illness from his twin.
Hamnet is based on a tragically unrelenting idea. The one that from the moment we give life to someone, we must accept that they escape us. It is then up to everyone to deal with the pain of this lost life. Here, William will take refuge in creation and flee everything that on a daily basis can remind him of the life before. That of happy days. Agnès will therefore take on this daily life alone, and the household and mental burdens that go with it. And we find this double movement in the interpretation of those that Chloe Zhao chose to embody these characters.
Paul Mescal thus steps aside here in front of Jesse Buckley but without it being a standoff between partners. Jesse Buckley simply occupies all the space that this scenario reserves for him and transcends it with this way of being both deeply earthy and immensely spiritual, without even having to go through the prism of words. We see that she has found the role of a lifetime here and it is difficult to see what could prevent her from being awarded her first Oscar in a few months.
But this interpretation would not have such intensity without the finely crafted framework in which it fits. Chloe Zhao and her director of photography Łukasz Żal, the man behind Ida and The Zone of Interest, multiply here the shots worthy of master paintings but which, like the superb soundtrack by Max Richter (Ad Astra) elevate instead of crushing. With this strong idea of a beauty that is sometimes as unbearable as what its characters go through. The kind of bet that does not support the near or any drop in speed. Chloe Zhao is made of that wood.
By Chloe Zhao With Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson… Duration 2h05. Released January 21, 2026
