Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet”, now available on select online platforms, has entered awards season with eight Oscar nominations, including best picture, best director, and best actress. According to critic Irina Karpova, the film, which appears designed to provoke a strong emotional response, did not affect her in the way its makers likely intended.
The film is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about the family of William Shakespeare. Its opening note reminds viewers that in Shakespeare’s time the names Hamlet and Hamnet were nearly indistinguishable in sound. While the novel immediately reveals the tragedy that divides the family’s life into a before and after, the film preserves suspense for longer, even if attentive viewers will quickly understand where the story is heading.
Karpova compares Zhao’s new work to “Nomadland” from 2020, where, in her view, the director had already blended reality and fiction. In “Hamnet,” that method is built around the gaps in Shakespeare’s biography. O’Farrell starts from a known fact: in 1596, eleven-year-old Hamnet died, and a few years later his father wrote “Hamlet.”
The adaptation, whose screenplay O’Farrell co-wrote, follows the spirit of the book but changes its structure. Instead of interweaving time layers, Zhao opts for a linear narrative: the couple’s meeting, marriage, the birth of their children, and Shakespeare’s departure for London. In Karpova’s assessment, that structure smooths out the story and removes some of the nuances that gave the family portrait its richness.
The central figure is Agnes, played by Jessie Buckley, whom the critic describes as one of the finest actresses working in English today. Agnes is portrayed as a woman bound to nature, intuition, and healing; those around her regard her as a witch. Yet Karpova argues that the film’s heightened mysticism often feels excessive and is not always justified by the story.
After Shakespeare leaves to work in London, the marriage becomes one lived at a distance. Then the plague arrives, and the family loses a child. Karpova notes that Zhao, together with cinematographer Lukasz Zal, presents the boy’s death as an almost mystical experience tied to sacrifice for his sick sister, while Buckley performs the loss in the register of classical tragedy.
The climax comes when Agnes travels to London for the premiere of “The Tragedy of Hamlet”, where the parents seem to try to reach their dead son through the stage performance. But this is also where, Karpova says, the film most forcefully presses for tears. For all the emotional intensity of Buckley’s scenes with Paul Mescal, the overcoming of grief ultimately feels artificial to her and does not emerge convincingly from the couple’s distant, fragmented relationship.
In the end, the critic concludes that despite its tenderness and obvious emotional ambition, “Hamnet” does not convincingly explain how the family’s private tragedy connects to the creation of “Hamlet.” She makes one exception: a scene in which skeptics and tearful spiritualists alike may agree that if a person lies down beside someone sick with plague, the outcome, she remarks, seems almost as predictable as a possible Oscar for Jessie Buckley on March 15.