Hamnet: Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel is a devastating exploration of loss and creative alchemy

Chloé Zhao’s wrenching adaptation of the bestselling 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell has been described as being about how Shakespeare wrote Hamlet after his young son, Hamnet, died. While technically accurate, that misses the exact mechanics of Zhao’s immersive account of the desire, grief, love and anger that course between a woman and her playwright husband, culminating in a remarkable demonstration of what art can do.

Since the non-professional-driven The Rider (2017), Zhao has never quite abandoned a search for a documentary immediacy and looseness within fictional drama, a means to disarm us with a reality that feels caught unawares. Academy voters deemed Nomadland (2020) the Best Picture fulfilment of these aims, though it could feel like the sort of tour through indigence that she surely wished to avoid. But with Hamnet, she does tap into something electric and raw, taking us through great trauma with the sense we don’t know its endpoint – because, when you’re in it, you really don’t.

She does so by treating each chapter in the romantic relationship of its characters Will and Agnes as a world of its own, a true present without a pre-written future. In the first part, teacher Will (Paul Mescal in a jerkin) and Agnes (Jessie Buckley) meet and are soon entranced; a primeval forest seems to chime with Agnes’s air of witchy independence. To an extent it’s a familiar tale of forbidden love despite family disapproval (Will’s mother: an intimidating Emily Watson), but Mescal and Buckley effectively stoke the sense of uncontrollable attraction (up to and including a snog on a table). You believe the Georgics-teaching Will and hawk-wielding Agnes are both bonded for life and consumed by each moment together, with Zhao and her director of photography Łukasz Żal creating, through long takes and silences, a sense of time suspended.

Swiftly enough, the family grows: Will and Agnes are parents, first to a daughter and then twins, with Żal’s cinematography shifting indoors to make a homey lair of their attic-like lodgings. The children bring spontaneous energy to the family, and Will becomes preoccupied by his late-night writing. Considering the film’s subject, the story has so far been relatively reserved about Will’s identity, but then he begins spending more time in London, setting up a marital conflict that feels like a bit of modern work/life balance angst projected on to the Elizabethan era.

Will’s absences become a grave matter with the illness of one twin, Judith, and then, as through some wished-for transference, her brother, Hamnet. The film’s mystical side surges back with Hamnet’s passing, with a vision of the boy stepping through a twilight world, somewhere between life and death, and, painfully to any parental eyes, absolutely alone. What follows are waves of rage, sadness and survivor guilt, as Agnes rails against Will for being away during the boy’s sickness. Shakespeare’s words are already being knitted into the film’s emotional fabric by this point: a shot of Hamnet’s gravestone is accompanied by a snatch of his Sonnet 12, on time and death, read in voiceover.

But it’s with a rehearsal sequence, showing Will almost punishingly repeating a Hamlet monologue, that we get a sense of the psychological and creative alchemy at work. It’s impossible to fully describe what the film is doing without describing its climactic sequence, in which Agnes attends her husband’s production of Hamlet at the Globe, out of curiosity fuelled mostly by simmering resentment, it seems. She’s shocked that her son’s name is central to the play – Hamnet and Hamlet being variants, as introductory text explains – and becomes a powerful vessel, both sceptical and naive, for the play’s art. (“What does any of this have to do with my son?” she shouts at the actors on stage, at first.)

Zhao proceeds to demonstrate just how art channels our emotions, somewhat recalling Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Drive My Car (2021). It helps that Will has written one of the greatest texts on death and living, but again, part of what Zhao achieves is the sense that it has all arisen organically, and that Agnes and her fellow groundlings are indeed recognising themselves in the drama for the first time. It’s to Buckley’s credit that she can pull off the kind of scene that on paper could sound trite (or worshipful of her husband’s talent). “Tell me a story,” she asks early in their courtship, and by the end the film shows powerfully just how much Will and all of us need to hear it too.

► Hamnet is in UK cinemas 9 January.