Hamnet.

On General Release 9^th January, 2026.
Directed By: Chloé Zhao
Written By: Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell; based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell

 

 

It is said to be awards-worthy, but here are reasons why Hamnet is an exceptionally bad film:

1. At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nobody used the term “Okay”.
2. At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, parents did not say “I love you.” to their children.
3. At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the first performance of Hamlet, the actor delivering “To be or not to be” would not have sat at the front of the stage, his feet dangling into the audience, addressing them like the facilitator of a therapy session.
4. At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the first performance of Hamlet, at the point where Hamlet is dying neither Agnes, nor anyone else in the audience, would have stretched out to hold the actor’s hands as if preparing for a group hug.

So, thus far, the film can be dismissed for its preposterous attempts to foist 21^st century mores onto a historical narrative, just as has been done recently with Mary Queen of Scots, David Copperfield, Ammonite, Hedda and the BBC’s Great Expectations.  When will writers and directors realise that re-presenting the past through the prism of modernity is dishonest and actually insulting to the audience? This story is set at a time when criminals were executed in public and anyone could die overnight from an infectious disease.  To assume that people of that time behaved, thought and felt like the nice people of today is utterly wrong-headed.

Other reasons why Hamnet is a bad film:

5. You can see the acting. Paul Mescal cannot shake off the veneer of mopey 21^st century man; Jessie Buckley is overly histrionic.
6. Whereas the two young actors playing Will and Agnes’s daughters bear a good resemblance to their parents, the young lad playing Hamnet has a round, cherubic face completely at odds with the rest of the family, and with no resemblance at all to his twin sister.
7. Agnes appears to be of the same age as Will, not eight years his senior.
8. At the first performance of Hamlet at the Globe the theatrical backdrop is rendered as a leafy forest (to tie in with Agnes’s favoured environment), not the battlements of a Danish castle.
9. Nothing is presented in the film to persuade us that the death of his son was the major motivation for Shakespeare’s writing of Hamlet.

To this last point some may say, ‘Hang on a minute, this is not a historical account, this is the filmic adaptation of a novel.’ And in the afterword of her book Maggie O’Farrell is careful to state that it is a work of fiction inspired by the short life of a boy who died in Stratford in 1596.  The fault of the film, therefore, is that it makes the connections much too specific.  ‘To be or not to be’ is not quoted once in the novel but appears twice in the film.  There is no doubt at all that this film concerns Shakespeare, his wife and kids and his burgeoning career.  The transition from written work to screen often, as here, involves a reduction – of poetry, of nuance, of imagination.  Film, of necessity, concretises the magic of ideas into inflexible little pixels.

So, what are we left with?  A rather cheap and relentless exercise in tear-jerking, and not much else.  A man, his mostly neglected wife and their dead child, and some form of belated reconciliation to tie up all the thorny problems of real life.  I don’t buy it.  The greatness of Shakespeare’s writing had very little to do with his domestic circumstances.  There is so much more in Hamlet, indeed in all the tragedies – fractious family relationships, the mechanics of power, the contemplation of death – for the work to be viewed just as the author’s processing of grief.

This film is awful guff.  Should you wish to get closer to the real dynamics of the Shakespeare family I cannot recommend enough Germain Greer’s excellently researched and well-written book, Shakespeare’s Wife.

© Graham Buchan 2026.