Hamnet (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

Hamnet

HAMNET (2025)

Starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, David Wilmot, Jacobi Jupe, Olivia Lynes, Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Freya Hannan-Mills, Dainton Anderson, Elliot Baxter, Noah Jupe, El Simons, Louisa Harland, Jack Shalloo, Sam Woolf, Hera Gibson, Zac Wishart, James Lintern, Justine Mitchell, Eva Wishart, Effie Linnen, Faith Delaney and Smylie Bradwell.

Screenplay by  Chloé Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell.

Directed by Chloé Zhao.

Distributed by Focus Features. 126 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Screened at the 2025 Philadelphia Film Festival.

Not every film about the personal life of William Shakespeare and the backstory of one of his classic plays can be as sweetly charming as Shakespeare in Love. That film was mostly light and comic, even though it is supposed to be the background of the writing of the tragedy Romeo and Juliet.

Hamnet, which is claiming to be “the real story” behind the writing of the tragic Hamlet, as you may have guessed by the similar sounding title. (According to a chyron at the beginning of the film, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were pretty interchangeable at the time.) This film is a much darker examination of what happened in his private life to move the Bard to write that tragic play.

Hamnet is also somewhat coyer about what it is doing, not really acknowledging that the male lead is William Shakespeare until rather late in the film. We know his name is William, and that he often has to leave his home in Stratford-on-Avon to go to London to do some sort of work in theater, but only eventually does it come out that this is who he is and this is what he is doing.

In fact, William is not the lead character here, that is his wife Agnes, played by Jessie Buckley. Will was out of town working through much of the run time of Hamnet, leaving Agnes to deal with raising the children and many other issues of day-to-day life in their dirty, drab, medieval village.

Still, Hamnet gives you a bit of context to the story of Hamlet. Of course, the book is not necessarily based on what really happened. It is based upon the 2020 historic fiction novel of the same name by Maggie O’Farrell, so how much of this film is based upon fact and how much it is based upon O’Farrell's imagination is a matter for debate.

Will and Agnes had three children, first daughter Susannah, and two years later they had twins, a boy named Hamnet and a girl named Judith. Young Hamnet died at only 11 years old in August of 1596. The official word after all these years is that Hamnet died of “unknown causes.”

Hamnet dramatizes his short life and his death and suggests that it may have been the inspiration for his father’s masterwork which (sort of) shared his name.

Like the play which inspired the novel (and this film), Hamnet is a dark, tragic piece of storytelling. Of course, this is mostly in the abstract -- the story of Hamnet has little to do with the story of Hamlet. Hamnet is – above all – a film about dealing with the loss of a child.

It may share a sense of bereft tragedy with the play – and perhaps, as suggested, the character of Hamlet was an imagination of how the boy may have grown – but there are not many shared plot points.

Still, this feeling of a parent’s devastation does add an unexpected power to the climax, in which Agnes surreptitiously goes up to London and experiences the opening performance of her husband’s work at the Globe Theater.

We will never know how much of what we see in Hamnet actually happened, but perhaps that is okay. Hamnet is inspired by Hamlet in much the same way that Hamlet was motivated by Hamnet, as a starting point for a grand piece of imagination.  

Jay S. Jacobs

Copyright ©2025 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: November 23, 2025.