What Grief Leaves Behind: A Hamnet Movie Review

Hamnet opens in stillness: soft light, rustling leaves, and a calm that feels almost sacred. Tranquil, breathtaking, and deeply uncomfortable, the film asks its audience to witness grief not as a dramatic arc, but as something lived, embodied, and endlessly unfinished. 

Hamnet imagines the private grief behind one of literature’s most public legacies. Directed by Chloé Zhao and produced by Steven Spielberg, the story traces the lives of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), following the birth and devastating loss of their young son, Hamnet. The tragedy becomes the film’s emotional core, not as romantic inspiration, but as a wound that never fully closes.

Zhao’s vision is rendered through the cinematography of Łukasz Żal, whose soft natural light and patient framing make the English countryside feel intimate and inhabited rather than mythic. The film unfolds at a meditative pace, allowing stillness and silence to carry as much weight as dialogue.

At the heart of Hamnet is Agnes, and the film is at its most powerful when it stays close to her. She isn’t positioned as a symbol or a tragic archetype, but a presence fully inhabited. Her connection to the woods, animals, herbs, and quiet pagan ritual doesn’t feel ornamental. It feels embodied, inherited, lived. This is womanhood framed as knowledge rather than performance, intuition rather than fantasy. The so-called “witch-wife” archetype is handled with rare intimacy, stripped of theatrical menace and instead grounded in care, grief, and survival.

The film’s acting anchors this narrative. Agnes is disturbingly convincing in a way that borders on physically unsettling. Flashbacks to her pagan childhood and moments of enchantment aren’t nostalgia trips; they contextualize her understanding of the world and offer a language for her grief. These moments give the character emotional interiority instead of myth, making her feel lived-in rather than written. 

That same commitment to embodiment extends to the film’s treatment of the body; the realism feels confrontational. Birth is not softened or aestheticized, and grief is not granted the mercy of distance. At its best, this discomfort feels necessary. The film refuses to romanticize female suffering or sanitize the physical cost of womanhood, insisting that pain be acknowledged rather than stylized.

At times, the film lingers too long, and endurance slips into repetition. The line between bearing witness and overexposure thins, leaving the viewer unsure whether the scene deepens understanding or simply tests tolerance. Even so, the discomfort is rarely hollow. It reinforces the film’s central insistence that grief is not a narrative device to be resolved, but a bodily state that reshapes everything it touches.

There is a spiritual language to Hamnet, speaking through the seasons of nature. Grief settles into bark and soil and into herbs crushed between fingers. Nature absorbs what cannot be spoken, holding pain without demanding resolution. 

This thematic grounding deepens the film’s treatment of grief and womanhood. Loss is not linear, and Hamnet refuses the comfort of progress. Agnes carries her grief by staying, by remaining rooted in place and body. While William carries his by leaving, fleeing into work, distance, and eventual myth. Neither response is framed as wrong, but they are not weighted equally. The film is clearest in its understanding of endurance; womanhood is not martyrdom, but persistence. It is the long, uncelebrated labor of continuing.

The final thirty minutes complicate this critique in meaningful ways. Watching Agnes and her brother witness the play is powerful, tragic, and unexpectedly healing. The performance becomes a bridge between loss and survival, weaving grief and healing together. For Agnes, it is not only an encounter with her child’s death, but a moment of forgiveness, an understanding that William’s absence was also an act of creation. The play stands as a testament to their shared tragedy, shaped from what could not be spoken.

Yet, that is precisely why the absence feels so pronounced. The ending is so effective, I wanted more of the making. More of the struggle, the doubt, the transformation that led there. We watch Agnes find healing through loss and recognition of her grief, intertwined with William’s devotion to art as a form of return.

In the end, Hamnet leaves us not with answers or redemption, but with the quiet understanding that some losses are carried, not cured. This choice doesn’t undo the film’s beauty, but it does define it. By prioritizing endurance over escape, the film becomes more a portrait of suffering than a study of transformation. The result is haunting and sincere, yet slightly incomplete. The story pauses just before fully tracing how grief becomes art, morphing unevenly and imperfectly into survival. Like grief, Hamnet offers no relief or resolution. Instead, it leaves us with something quieter and more honest: the courage to sit with what cannot be undone.

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• Hamnet
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