For a movie so doggedly trained on raw pain and deep emotionality, Hamnet is awfully removed. This is a logistical distinction, not a thematic one, pertaining to the vast space that often exists between the camera and its subject, but technique is ever inextricable from content. Just about everything that happens in a movie is a choice, and Chloé Zhao isn’t prone to accidents. The Oscar-winning director behind Nomadland is a proponent of lavish, intricate environments that seem to loom over her characters, informing their actions and relaying their internal dialogue without uttering a syllable. They seem small from her vantage point, ushered from one location on the chess board to another for maximal dramatic effect, with the stifling of sobs as the primary objective. The best filmmakers have a tendency to play god, fiddling with an audience’s tear ducts and nerve endings until you give yourself over to their vision, reveling in the naked manipulation. That’s a lot of power to hold over a paying customer, but Zhao’s forward-facing earnestness would have you believe she’s a gentle, forgiving deity. Come a little closer, and you’ll find out just how vindictive she can be.

Those claws are barred from the opening frames of Hamnet, though you’d be forgiven for missing them amidst the lushness of the shrubbery. Somewhere down on that forest floor lies Agnes (Jessie Buckley), the problem child of a middle class family situated in rural 16th-century England. Rumors of her mysterious, witchy ways spread freely across the local community, but none of them stop Will (Paul Mescal) from becoming immediately ensorcelled. Ignoring the protests emanating from both of their houses, the two are soon wed, bringing three children into their idyllic domesticity, though that fabled work-life balance proves just as flummoxing then as it is today. Sensing her husband’s dissatisfaction, and fully convinced of his latent greatness, Agnes encourages Will to explore his talents out in the big city, only for tragedy to befall their home in his absence. At least he’s making the most of his time away.

If you somehow haven’t guessed by now, the rest of Will’s name is -iam Shakespeare, though Zhao’s screenplay, co-written by Maggie O’Farrell and adapted from her novel of the same name, seems reluctant to put that truth into words. Intoning the Bard directly comes with a metric ton of baggage, pointing to lofty academic ambitions by wielding the most totemic literary canon known to man. During movie awards season, it also can’t help but bring to mind one of the most controversial Best Picture winners of modern times, Shakespeare in Love, and while Zhao’s film could hardly be more different in tone, they’re ostensibly playing the same game. Any costume drama released between the months of October and January is done so with accolades in mind, and while Hamnet’s stately, earthy adornments have the appearance of something too avant garde for the Academy’s usual liking, they eventually give off the pungent smell of over-compensation. Strip away all the wide angles and beatific asymmetry, and you’ve got a fairly standard weepie, one that doth protest too much about its tissue-soiling aims.

Cheekily quoting Hamlet to make a point might seem a little garish, but that doesn’t stop Zhao from doing just the same, sending Mescal out to the nighttime shoreline, reciting the famed ‘To be or not to be’ speech to no one but himself. The suicidal ideations come out of nowhere, but without them, their speaker wouldn’t have a ready-made Oscar clip, the kind that dots Hamnet’s runtime like a vicious case of acne. Most belong to Buckley, whose status as 2025’s Best Actress frontrunner has been written in ink for some months now. It’s not hard to see why; crying, screaming, and writhing with abandon, she’s about the only believable thing in a movie that’s manufactured with only torment and duress in mind. Those tear streaks might as well be tattooed to her face for the film’s latter half, but the feral, untamed quality of her initial passages is just as mesmerizing, casting the same spell on the viewer as she does on her paramour. Her performance is the flick’s primary achievement, but also emblematic of its relentless coercion.  

Don’t let those wide open woodlands fool you; Hamnet wants to squeeze until we all cry uncle, wrapping itself around a darkened theater like an ill-tempered boa constrictor. The malevolent stillness favored by cinematographer Łukasz Żal promotes fealty over connection, so painterly that you almost forget about the drama that’s unfolding within. It also runs the risk of putting any under-caffeinated viewer straight to sleep, Max Richter’s plaintive score practically pulling the blanket up just under your neck and leaving a warm cup of tea on the bedside table. If On the Nature of Daylight, his pocket-sized stunner that plays underneath the film’s conclusion, sounds familiar, it’s because filmmakers have been using it for years now as a cheat code to get the waterworks going. It’s heard prominently in Arrival, Shutter Island, and The Last of Us, but at least all of those examples found an optical niche to call their own. Zhao is working with prepackaged ingredients and cooking from a vetted prestige recipe, and before we rush to hand out trophies for Fiona Crombie’s production design and Malgosia Turzanska’s costume work, it’s worth observing the narrow imagination of everything in sight. Period pieces don’t need to be anachronistic, but they shouldn’t be celebrated for repurposing the homespun creations of their antecedents either, and Hamnet gets awfully comfortable drifting in the wake of analogous laurel season heavyweights.

But really, who could blame it? The known parameters of this renowned subgenre are comely indeed, and Zhao presses her thumb down on the scale of gorgeousness so hard that resplendence is all that’s left. Perhaps ridiculing a movie for being too prepossessing is a bad faith argument, but Hamnet prioritizes its own attractiveness at every step, blunting the force of its narrative. The arrangement takes precedence over the players, who seem to be moving about a doll house at the behest of an exacting, unseen hand. Squint hard enough, and the most recent proper comparison is 2018’s Hereditary, though being at the mercy of an all-seeing, all-knowing entity is textual in the case of Ari Aster’s instant horror classic. Zhao wants to have her cake and eat it with the tiniest, most aesthetically pleasing fork ever created, syphoning grandeur and importance out of grief and solace, all while smothering us in the wonder of her own technical abilities. That distance she favors is for the best; from this far off vantage point, the disingenuousness of Hamnet’s open heart is crystal clear.