The Telluride Film Festival is one of awards season’s biggest stages, and Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao delivered a command performance on its opening night. The Nomadland filmmaker’s latest feature, Hamnet — which stars Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his wife Agnes — took a first bow in front of an eager audience of critics and film fans, who spilled out of the theater feeling shaken and stirred.
“The most devastating movie I’ve seen in years,” reads the headline of Bilge Ebiri‘s rave New York review of Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell‘s 2020 novel that imagines what might have happened in the Shakespeare marriage following the death of the couple’s young son and the impact it had on the Bard of Avon’s most famous play. “The book was overwhelming, too,” Ebiri notes, adding that he went into Zhao’s film version steeling himself for an emotional gut punch.
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“Still, I did not really expect to cry this much,” he writes. “That’s not just because of the tragic weight of the material, but because the picture reimagines the poetic act of creating Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play sits on the highest shelf. … And yet, here is a movie that dares to explore its inception. The attempt itself is noble, and maybe a little brazen; that it succeeds feels downright supernatural.”
Variety‘s Peter Debruge also uses “devastating” in his headline, specifically in reference to Buckley’s performance. “The actor has shown a fierce, rebellious, untamable spirit since the 2018 role that put her on the map, Wild Rose,” he observes, drawing comparisons between Zhao’s film and the work of Terrence Malick. “It’s a beautiful, radical, dangerous act,” Debruge says, later noting: “If “Hamnet” feels too much at times, ask yourself why that is. Is it the movie’s fault, or is Zhao challenging us to confront something we’ve been avoiding until now?”
Writing in The Hollywood Reporter, Angie Han throws some love Mescal’s way, calling the Gladiator II star’s performance “wonderful” and reiterating that viewers should be ready for tears. “He underplays his emotions when one might expect him to go big, which makes the moments when he does explode all the more impactful,” Han writes. “But it’s Buckley who really stuns, as she evolves Agnes from the free-spirited girl of the grass to the loving wife and mother to the brittle and grieving woman. She grounds a character who could have seemed too ethereal in raw, naked feeling; there’s a moment when she screams with grief until she runs out of sound that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.”
Over in The Playlist, Gregory Ellwood indicates that Hamnet is a return to form for Zhao after her detour into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the divisive Eternals. “Zhao is back to the expressionistic and realistic aesthetic that captivated in her previous films… except, with a bit of a twist. World-building has become a bit of a dirty word in cinema circles these days, but it’s inherent to Zhao’s vision of late 16th-century England. … [She] pulls that off not only by setting the film’s non-traditional tone almost immediately, but by pulling incredibly grounded and visceral turns from her actors.”
“Welcome back, Chloé Zhao,” Ellwood concludes. “We missed you.”
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