Middleburg Review: “Hamnet”

Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025) 2½ out of 5 stars

Hamnet is the kind of movie where one feels terrible when not moved as much as the onscreen characters. They wail and proclaim their grief, making quite the intense spectacle. Give me more films like director Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-winning Nomadland, instead, please, where the struggle to articulate emotion, rather than the overwrought expression of it, is the defining point of the drama. Here, we get anguish to the n^th degree, with little room for imagination.

Until the end, when Zhao—who cowrote the screenplay with author Maggie O’Farrell, whose eponymous 2020 novel is the source text—almost redeems the movie with a truly moving final act. As profound as that conclusion may be, however, it comes on the heels of a disjointed narrative that undercuts its own potential power at frequent intervals, fading to black after scenes have barely begun. And then there is the cinematically questionable choice of central musical theme.

Composer Max Richter has written many great works, including scores for films such as the 2007 Waltz with Bashir, the 2018 Mary Queen of Scots, and the 2019 Ad Astra. “On the Nature of Daylight,” from Richter’s 2004 album The Blue Notebooks, has been used a number of times by filmmakers, most notably as the opening and closing melody of Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 Arrival. It’s a magnificent piece, roiling passions almost bursting beyond the symphonic chords.

Richter has repurposed the composition for Hamnet, while also writing the rest of the soundtrack, much of it new. But just as the plaintive cries of the titular boy and his  mother never quite prove as effective as the relative quiet of the ending moments, so, too, does the familiarity of “On the Nature of Daylight” act in opposition to the desired result. Directors choose well-known music all the time—classical, modern, and otherwise—and this is not a cardinal sin. But it does lack inspiration.

Jessie Buckley (Wicked Little Letters) stars as Agnes, a young woman in Elizabethan England who marries her half-brothers’ Latin tutor (as he is referred to in the book), a would-be playwright working off his father’s debts. She’s a creature of the woods—both she and her deceased mother viewed by the locals as something of a witch—and he has aspirations elsewhere. Though we won’t hear his name until the end, the man is William (Will) Shakespeare (Paul Mescal, Aftersun). The young woman is Anne Hathaway, who becomes his wife.

They have three children, the older one Susanna and the younger two fraternal twins named Judith and Hamnet (which an opening title card informs us was, in that era, interchangeable with “Hamlet”). Through elliptical cuts, the kids grow older while dad establishes himself offscreen in the theater world of London and mom stays home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Eventually, illness (the plague) strikes down Hamnet, though all assumed Judith was more susceptible. The parents are separately torn apart by sorrow until Will finds a way to communicate his despair in the completion of his great tragedy, Hamlet.

The above plot is conveyed ably enough, and the town’s surrounding forest is beautifully rendered by cinematographer Lukasz Zal (The Zone of Interest) and production designer Fiona Crombie (Cruella) and her team. As is the Globe Theatre, where Hamlet premieres, Agnes and her brother, Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn, The Brutalist) in attendance. This is the brilliantly effective heart of the movie.

For here, Zhao and O’Farrell draw parallels between the Prince of Denmark’s fate and that of Agnes and Will’s son, the audience (both us and the one within the movie) deeply engaged in every bit of the play. Would that the earlier parts of the story were as strong. Buckley and Mescal deliver sincere performances, but it’s only at the Globe that they can truly shine. Nothing is rotten in the state of Denmark; it’s just overly ripe before we get there.