Mill Valley 2025 Review: HAMNET, Oscar Winner Chloé Zhao Directs Heart-Shredding Domestic Drama

After winning a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Director for 2020’s Nomadland, filmmaker Chloé Zhao (The Rider, Songs My Brothers Taught Me) turned her considerable talents to the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) and at one point, a much-anticipated adaptation of writer-artist Jack “King” Kirby’s sprawling, cosmos-spanning comic-book series, the Eternals.

 

Despite Zhao's involvement as co-writer and director, Eternals faltered critically and commercially, a noble, if ultimately futile, effort. It failed to engage audiences sufficient to justify its effects-heavy production budget, effectively aborting a hoped-for standalone series well before the end credits rolled. 

 

But where the MCU thwarted Zhao’s earnest efforts to bring her brand of grounded, empathetic humanism to comic-book superheroes and their big-screen adventures, Zhao’s latest film, Hamnet, an impressively realized, emotionally rending adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling 2020 novel, leaves the spandex behind for a return to the character-driven drama where she's excelled in the past, Working from a screenplay she co-wrote with O'Farrell, Zhao not only directed Hamnet, she edited, and produced it as well. That level of creative control rarely happens in or out of Hollywood, more so for filmmakers working on high-profile, studio-owed intellectual property like the Disney-owed MCU.

 

Set at the turn of the 16th century, Hamnet centers on Agnes “Anne” Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) and William "Will" Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), opening in the woods surrounding Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire County, England. Subtly attuned to the rhythms and wonders of the natural world, Agnes prefers the densely overgrown, verdant forest over her family or the people who live in the nearby town.

 

Like her mother before her, Agnes’s beliefs lean toward paganism and folklore, the latter providing Agnes and her family with rituals, practices, and, almost as importantly, natural treatments (remedies) in a pre-scientific, methodic, Christianity-centered world. For Agnes, the forest offers not just connection to nature with a capital “N,” but a kind of spiritual communion that would lead to accusations of witchcraft and sorcery against Agnes.

 

But for William (here called “Will” by family and friends), a glover’s son employed as a Latin tutor to pay off his father’s debts, Agnes represents the irresistible "other," both known and unknowable. Besotted with the older Agnes at first sight, Will ardently pursues her, using his gift for language — an understatement, obviously — to woo the woman who, in short order, becomes “hand-fasted” to him, later pregnant out of wedlock, and later still, his wife and the mother of his three children, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), the first-born daughter, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes), twins whose arrival adds to a mostly content, full life for Agnes and Will.

 

Where Will, however, finds himself creatively frustrated, pining for something more beyond his life as a glover’s son and Latin tutor, writing long into the night, Agnes recognizes that loving Will also means letting him go, not as a romantic partner or the father of her children, but physically (I.e., geographically): Will’s hopes as a playwright lie in England’s center of creativity, London. Separation follows along with periodic visits as Will’s fame grows in far-off London while Agnes and the children, materially comfortable, grow and thrive, albeit with Will’s absence keenly felt by everyone involved.

 

Hamnet turns on the inexplicable loss of the title character to a sudden illness and the fractures his loss creates in the lives of Agnes, Will, and the surviving children. Where Agnes openly grieves Hamnet’s loss with a primal force that would make mountains metaphorically tremble but could never bring back the son she unconditionally loves, Will retreats to London, leaving Agnes even more alone, more bereft, and their relationship, founded on mutual love and a deep understanding of each other’s needs, floundering and on the verge of collapse. 

 

An opening title card indicates that “Hamlet” and “Hamnet” were used interchangeably during the Elizabethan era, all but signposting Hamnet (the film) will lead to a grief-stricken Will channeling the loss of his into writing Hamlet, arguably his most famous, most popular play (after Romeo & Juliet), the void left behind (represented visually by a hollow at the base of a tree), and an act of creativity that, at least in part, immortalized Hamnet through the fictionalized Hamlet, the doomed, conscience-stricken Prince of Denmark fated to die dramatically in the play’s closing moments. 

 

Through an alchemical mix of Buckley’s densely layered, unmannered performance as Agnes, Zhao’s generously unobtrusive, performance-centered direction, and a narrative that builds to a devastatingly cathartic crescendo: Agnes, seemingly venturing to London with her brother, Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), for the first time, raptly watches Hamlet’s premiere standing in the front row, Hamnet becomes far greater than the sum of its already considerable parts.

 

Hamnet is both singular in its keenly observed depiction of a loving marriage roiled by loss, grief, and despair, and universal as a standalone narrative intimately familiar to the audience on the other side of the screen.