DRAMA; 2hr 6min
STARRING: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal
Writer’s room: Buckley and Mescal
There’s a fresh energy to Nomadland director Chloé Zhao and her co-writer Maggie O’Farrell’s inventive twist on hallowed ground: although set in the 16th century, with the inspiration for William Shakespeare’s Hamlet as its weighty theme, as adapted from O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, this fictionalised treatment of the Bard and his wife plays out as a timeless insight into the dynamics of a marriage.
Young William (Aftersun’s Mescal) is a restless Latin tutor and aspiring playwright in the ramshackle English village of Stratford-upon-Avon. After one look at local girl Agnes (Beast ’s Buckley), roaming the woods with her pet falcon and her psychic, earth-mother vibes, the boy with big ideas is a goner. Their stuffy families — Emily Watson radiates pursed disapproval as William’s mother, Mary; David Wilmot is his martinet father, John — couldn’t be less impressed when they learn that Agnes is pregnant. Absorbed in each other, William and Agnes are a done deal regardless.
Agnes gives excruciating birth to three children (Bodhi Rae Breathnach as elder daughter Susanna and Jacobi Jupe and Olivia Lynes as twins Hamnet and Judith), a life for which she seems to be born. She deals serenely with her brood, unbothered by her artistic husband taking off to London to write. His career gamble pays off in spades, needless to say, leaving the family free to romp in scenic peace, until tragedy strikes in the lethal shape of bubonic plague.
William and Agnes did, in fact, have a son named Hamnet (its spelling interchangeable back then with Hamlet), who died at age 11 in 1596. While his death could well have been plague-related, its cause and its connection to the inspiration of Shakespeare’s play are undetermined. Regardless of Shakespeare’s intention when writing Hamlet, what strikes at the heart, as sharply today as it did centuries ago with Buckley’s anguished, feral Agnes, are the finality of death and the endless purgatory of unresolved grief.
