When most audiences walked out of Chloé Zhao’s latest film “Hamnet,” they were wracked with grief and soaked in tears. “It’s all terrifying, transcendent and so intimately human,” reads WSN’s own review. Actress Iman Vellani, in her review on Letterboxd with over 16,000 likes, asked the movie’s star, Jessie Buckley, to “pls hold my hand and tell me if I’m EVER going to recover from this.”
When I walked out of “Hamnet,” however, my eyes were bone dry.
Five months after its festival premiere in August 2025, “Hamnet” has received critical acclaim, two Golden Globe awards — including best film in the drama category — and eight nominations at the upcoming 98th Academy Awards. I’m a bit baffled by all this buzz.
“Hamnet” is an adaptation of Northern Irish author Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 book of the same name. Zhao and O’Farrell co-wrote the screenplay, which follows William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Buckley) facing the death of their son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe). Agnes cries a lot, William writes the play “Hamlet” and everyone has an emotional catharsis or two by the time the credits roll.
To be clear, “Hamnet” is not meant to be a biography of Shakespeare. In her author’s note, O’Farrell writes that the book is “a work of fiction, inspired by the short life of a boy who died in Stratford.” The film follows suit, making it clear that Zhao expects her romance to hit home regardless of the historical accuracy.
So let’s run through the boy-meets-girl cliche of “Hamnet,” divorcing our protagonists from their famous surname. The boy is Will, equipped with a smoldering stare and a single hoop earring. The girl is Agnes, the “child of a forest witch” who can “see things.” Translation: She isn’t like the other girls in the village.
Using well-worn tropes in a romance is not a crime, but the issue with “Hamnet” is that Will and Agnes have nothing besides these cliches. The pair go from complete strangers to passionately kissing before the film hits its 10-minute mark, and their whirlwind romance isn’t motivated by any spark. The two just run around in the woods for a bit, and boom: marriage. When Agnes’ brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) questions this hasty wedding, Agnes defends Will: “He loves me for what I am, not for what I ought to be.”
Well, Agnes, if you say so. The audience hasn’t seen any of this love, so it’s hard to get invested in the pair. Following their marriage, Agnes and Will get along like an incredibly normal couple who deal with conflict by communicating. For about an hour, “Hamnet” is a period drama with nothing dramatic about it.
That is, until the bubonic plague hits Stratford and Hamnet tragically dies from the sickness. Will can, apparently, only process his grief through his writing, an illustration of the film’s thesis that life feeds into art. Zhao and O’Farrell gesture at this at many points. For example, Agnes teaches her kids that rosemary is “for remembrance,” a line that appears in Will’s play as Hamlet’s wife-to-be Ophelia slips into insanity. The audience is meant to understand that Will immortalized this part of his family in his play, but this cannot work without an encyclopedic knowledge of “Hamlet.”
It’s impossible to even recognize the line when they finally perform “Hamlet” in the movie’s final act because the play has been truncated into a measly 30-minute sequence of cherry-picked monologues and half-scenes. Ophelia and her brother Laertes have no lines, and their father Polonius is nowhere to be found.
I would even argue that Shakespeare doesn’t show up in this sequence. Gone is his original, brilliant plot of a troubled man assailed by grief, indecision, mortality and thoughts of revenge. In its place is a mere fairy tale where a character named Hamlet emotionally reconciles with his dead father and heroically swordfights the forces of evil. The “Hamlet” depicted in “Hamnet” is a hallucination.
I don’t need an ironclad level of faithfulness to the original text in “Hamnet.” Other artists, like playwrights James Ijames and Tom Stoppard, have repurposed “Hamlet” for their own dramatic heights. But Zhao and O’Farrell rely on the concept of Shakespeare just to lend legitimacy to the otherwise generic romance, which has no place at this year’s Oscars ceremony. In the sea of unrecognized feminist dramas last year, their misguided historical romantasy didn’t even deserve a nomination.
Contact Ethan Li at [email protected].