🕷️ Crawler Inspector

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Raw Queries and Responses

1. Shard Calculation

Query:

Response:

Calculated Shard: 84 (from laksa166)

2. Crawled Status Check

Query:

curl -X POST \
  'http://laksa084.int.ahrefs:8124/' \
  -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' \
  -H 'X-ClickHouse-Database: crawler3' \
  -H 'Authorization: Basic YXBpOg==' \
  -d 'SELECT getAhrefsURLFromUnparsed(src_unparsed) AS found_url, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(download_stamp), 0) AS crawl_time, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(props_url_first_seen), 0) AS first_indexed_time, download_http_code AS http_code, src_unparsed AS src_unparsed, src_root_hash AS src_root_hash, history_drop_reason AS history_drop_reason, meta_title AS meta_title, meta_descriptions AS meta_descriptions, attrs_boilerpipe_text AS attrs_boilerpipe_text, attrs_markdown AS attrs_markdown, attrs_readable_markdown AS attrs_readable_markdown, meta_canonical AS meta_canonical FROM crawler3.page_info_local FINAL PREWHERE (src_root_hash, src_unparsed) IN ((getAhrefsRootHashFromUnparsed(getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/movies/hamnet-review.html\')), getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/movies/hamnet-review.html\'))) FORMAT JSONEachRow'

Response:

{"found_url":"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/11\/26\/movies\/hamnet-review.html","crawl_time":1771148351,"first_indexed_time":1764152029,"http_code":200,"src_unparsed":"com,nytimes!www,\/2025\/11\/26\/movies\/hamnet-review.html s443","src_root_hash":"4566504020376537684","history_drop_reason":null,"meta_title":"‘Hamnet’ Review: The Rest Is Silence - The New York Times","meta_descriptions":["Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal star in a heartbreaking adaptation of the best-selling novel."],"attrs_boilerpipe_text":"Advertisement\nSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\nCritic’s Pick\nJessie Buckley and Paul Mescal star in a heartbreaking adaptation of the best-selling novel.\nJessie Buckley, left, and Paul Mescal in “Hamnet.”\nCredit...\nAgata Grzybowska\/Focus Features\nPublished Nov. 26, 2025\nUpdated Dec. 1, 2025\nHamnet\nNYT Critic’s Pick\nDirected by\nChloé Zhao\nBiography, Drama, History\nPG-13\n2h 5m\nMaggie O’Farrell’s book “\nHamnet: A Novel of the Plague\n\" happened to be first published, in either an act of grace or a twisted cosmic joke, on March 31, 2020. These things can’t be planned. The novel tells an imagined story springing from a set of scant facts: The 11-year-old Hamnet Shakespeare died in 1596, and given this timing, the cause seems likely to have been the pandemic we now call the Black Plague. A few years later, Hamnet’s father’s greatest work, a play about grief, was first performed.\nDuring this era, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were often used interchangeably. Add to all of this one more oddity: Despite living in a world haunted by the bubonic plague nearly his whole life, Shakespeare almost\nnever addressed it directly in his work\n. Surely these facts, taken together, can’t be mere coincidence?\nIn “Hamnet,” O’Farrell tells a story of the Shakespeares and their grief. In the foreground are the lives of Agnes Shakespeare and her children, but also the work the bereaved father spun from his grief, and what this might have meant for the love between Agnes and Will. In the background is a pandemic-afflicted England, with quarantines and death and doctors in plague masks.\nNow, five years and a whole world later, the novel is a film. O’Farrell wrote the screenplay with the film’s director, Chloé Zhao, who infuses it with the same blend of heartache and beauty that pulsed in previous films like\n“The Rider”\nand\n“Nomadland.”\nThose movies were understated, and “Hamnet” is too, to a degree: Zhao makes much of an object on a table, a bit of wind whipping through branches. But “Hamnet” is also ardent and searing and brimming with emotion. That amount of heat can be tough to handle without veering into sentimentality. In a few places Zhao can’t, or won’t, keep it under control.\nBut “Hamnet” still works most of the time, in large part because of its stars, especially the magnificent Jessie Buckley, who plays Agnes. We first meet her curled up under a tree in the forest, like some wooded creature or forest sprite, clad in a red dress. Whenever Agnes is in the forest, Zhao plays with the visual proportions of human to tree such that she seems to have slipped into some fairy tale or mythic realm. Agnes comes from a line of women who can see beyond the visible, more a creature of the pagan domain than of the rapidly modernizing, far more Christian world in the village.\nShe meets Will (Paul Mescal), a young Latin tutor who scribbles fervently by candlelight, and their magnetic bond rapidly turns into a family. From there the story becomes one of joy, then acute grief, then the dull gray blankness of ongoing mourning, when nothing in the world will ever seemingly be set to rights. Agnes is the soul of the emotional arc, and Will is in London much of the time.\nWhere this all will end up is the story’s secret, but you know it will have to do with “Hamlet.” Any tale in which real life and love become the raw materials for art can slip very quickly into forehead-smacking cliché, with famous elements from the end product showing up in the character’s lives like little Easter eggs for us, the viewers in the know.\nThat is not “Hamnet,” and it couldn’t have been — “Hamlet,” after all, is about a dead father, not a dead son. What artists actually do is act like field mice, picking up this bit of string and that scrap of metal and configuring it all later into something entirely new, their way of processing the world by filtering it through time and experience. This is what “Hamnet” captures beautifully: Agnes’s lessons on plants, learned from her mother and repeated to her children, surface in Ophelia’s mouth. It’s handled with the kind of sensitivity that comes from artists who know how all of this works.\nBuckley’s performance is ferocious and astounding, starting off strong and somehow picking up power as the movie goes along. There’s something so sonorous in her low, melodic voice that in the moment when she loses it entirely, in silent, screaming paroxysms of grief, it smacks you right in the gut. And while she’ll rightly get all of the attention as the core and heart of the film, Mescal also knocked me flat, particularly when he delivers Shakespeare’s own lines with the emotion that this version of Will would be feeling.\nThe parts of the film that feel beautifully full to overflowing are undercut, occasionally, by feelings of just a little\ntoo\nmuch, a shot or directorial choice that’s just a tad too precious. The most egregious example is the use of Max Richter’s song “On the Nature of Daylight” in a pivotal emotional moment. It’s a beautiful piece of music, somehow the saddest song in the world. But it’s been so overused by now (in “Arrival,” “Shutter Island” and “The Last of Us,” just to name a few of many) that the spell instantly breaks.\nCuriously, what isn’t in this film adaptation is the backdrop of the plague, other than the sickness that takes young Hamnet. Arguably that would have muddied the waters in the shortened length of a feature, so it’s understandable. Perhaps nothing would have been gained by that added historical reference.\nBut look around, and you’ll see there’s little appetite for pandemic art these days, just as there has been in the past. Yet you can also observe all the markings of a long, gray blankness, a lot of collective wounding that never really got worked out. Like Shakespeare himself, apparently, we find some things too painful to come at head-on. Sometimes you have to approach sorrow sideways to understand it; sometimes a play like “Hamlet,” or a movie like “Hamnet,” can show you how to move through those dark woods.\nHamnet\nRated PG-13 for the painful death of a child, and some mild language and sexual content. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters.\nAlissa Wilkinson\nis a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.\nA version of this article appears in print on\nNov. 28, 2025\n, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Spinning ‘Hamlet’ From Love And Grief\n.\nOrder Reprints\n|\nToday’s Paper\n|\nSubscribe\nRelated Content\nMore in Movies\nWarner Bros. Pictures\nWarner Bros.\nWarner Bros. Pictures\nCBS, via Getty Images\nEditors’ Picks\nBrian Rea\nYvonne Tnt\/BFA.com, via Shutterstock\nTrending in The Times\nDragan Arsovski\nAriana Drehsler for The New York Times\nAliona Kardash for The New York Times\nDoug Mills\/The New York Times\nJulia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini.\nImage by James Hill for The New York Times\nMathew Imaging\/FilmMagic, via Getty Images\nIllustration by Tomi Um\nPhoto Illustration by Philotheus Nisch for The New York Times\nNicolas Ortega\nAdvertisement\nSKIP ADVERTISEMENT","attrs_markdown":"[Skip to content](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/11\/26\/movies\/hamnet-review.html#site-content)[Skip to site index](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/11\/26\/movies\/hamnet-review.html#site-index)\n\nSearch & Section Navigation\n\nSection Navigation\n\nSearch\n\n[Movies](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/movies)\n\n[Log in](https:\/\/myaccount.nytimes.com\/auth\/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fsubscription%2Fonboarding-offer%3FcampaignId%3D7JFJX%26EXIT_URI%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.nytimes.com%252F2025%252F11%252F26%252Fmovies%252Fhamnet-review.html&asset=masthead)\n\nSunday, February 15, 2026\n\n[Today’s Paper](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/todayspaper)\n\n[What to Watch](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/spotlight\/what-to-watch)\n\n- [Oscar Nominees: Where to Stream](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/01\/22\/movies\/oscar-nominees-2026-how-to-watch.html)\n- [‘Wuthering Heights’](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/12\/movies\/wuthering-heights-review-margot-robbie-jacob-elordi.html)\n- [‘Goat’](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/12\/movies\/goat-review.html)\n- [‘Crime 101’](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/12\/movies\/crime-101-review.html)\n- [‘Scarlet’](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/12\/movies\/scarlet-anime-hosoda-hamlet-review.html)\n- [‘Neighbors’](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/13\/arts\/television\/neighbors-review-one-battle-after-another.html)\n\nAdvertisement\n\n[SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/11\/26\/movies\/hamnet-review.html#after-top)\n\nSupported by\n\n[SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/11\/26\/movies\/hamnet-review.html#after-sponsor)\n\nCritic’s Pick\n\n# ‘Hamnet’ Review: The Rest Is Silence\nJessie Buckley and Paul Mescal star in a heartbreaking adaptation of the best-selling novel.\n\n- Share full article\n- 346\n\n![A man and woman in period clothing stand close together in a mossy, dense forest, facing each other among fallen branches and green foliage.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/11\/28\/multimedia\/26cul-hamnet-review1-thfl\/26cul-hamnet-review1-thfl-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n\nJessie Buckley, left, and Paul Mescal in “Hamnet.”Credit...Agata Grzybowska\/Focus Features\n\n[![Alissa Wilkinson](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/01\/05\/reader-center\/author-alissa-wilkinson\/author-alissa-wilkinson-thumbLarge.png)](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/by\/alissa-wilkinson)\n\nBy [Alissa Wilkinson](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/by\/alissa-wilkinson)\n\nPublished Nov. 26, 2025Updated Dec. 1, 2025\n\nHamnet\n\nNYT Critic’s Pick\n\nDirected by Chloé Zhao\n\nBiography, Drama, History\n\nPG-13\n\n2h 5m\n\n[Find Tickets](https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/showtimes\/title\/tt14905854?ref_=ref_ext_NYT)\n\nWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.\n\nMaggie O’Farrell’s book “[Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/07\/17\/books\/review\/hamnet-maggie-ofarrell.html)\" happened to be first published, in either an act of grace or a twisted cosmic joke, on March 31, 2020. These things can’t be planned. The novel tells an imagined story springing from a set of scant facts: The 11-year-old Hamnet Shakespeare died in 1596, and given this timing, the cause seems likely to have been the pandemic we now call the Black Plague. A few years later, Hamnet’s father’s greatest work, a play about grief, was first performed.\n\nDuring this era, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were often used interchangeably. Add to all of this one more oddity: Despite living in a world haunted by the bubonic plague nearly his whole life, Shakespeare almost [never addressed it directly in his work](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment\/what-shakespeare-actually-wrote-about-the-plague). Surely these facts, taken together, can’t be mere coincidence?\n\nIn “Hamnet,” O’Farrell tells a story of the Shakespeares and their grief. In the foreground are the lives of Agnes Shakespeare and her children, but also the work the bereaved father spun from his grief, and what this might have meant for the love between Agnes and Will. In the background is a pandemic-afflicted England, with quarantines and death and doctors in plague masks.\n\nNow, five years and a whole world later, the novel is a film. O’Farrell wrote the screenplay with the film’s director, Chloé Zhao, who infuses it with the same blend of heartache and beauty that pulsed in previous films like [“The Rider”](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/04\/11\/movies\/the-rider-review.html) and [“Nomadland.”](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/02\/18\/movies\/nomadland-review.html) Those movies were understated, and “Hamnet” is too, to a degree: Zhao makes much of an object on a table, a bit of wind whipping through branches. But “Hamnet” is also ardent and searing and brimming with emotion. That amount of heat can be tough to handle without veering into sentimentality. In a few places Zhao can’t, or won’t, keep it under control.\n\nBut “Hamnet” still works most of the time, in large part because of its stars, especially the magnificent Jessie Buckley, who plays Agnes. We first meet her curled up under a tree in the forest, like some wooded creature or forest sprite, clad in a red dress. Whenever Agnes is in the forest, Zhao plays with the visual proportions of human to tree such that she seems to have slipped into some fairy tale or mythic realm. Agnes comes from a line of women who can see beyond the visible, more a creature of the pagan domain than of the rapidly modernizing, far more Christian world in the village.\n\nShe meets Will (Paul Mescal), a young Latin tutor who scribbles fervently by candlelight, and their magnetic bond rapidly turns into a family. From there the story becomes one of joy, then acute grief, then the dull gray blankness of ongoing mourning, when nothing in the world will ever seemingly be set to rights. Agnes is the soul of the emotional arc, and Will is in London much of the time.\n\nWhere this all will end up is the story’s secret, but you know it will have to do with “Hamlet.” Any tale in which real life and love become the raw materials for art can slip very quickly into forehead-smacking cliché, with famous elements from the end product showing up in the character’s lives like little Easter eggs for us, the viewers in the know.\n\nThat is not “Hamnet,” and it couldn’t have been — “Hamlet,” after all, is about a dead father, not a dead son. What artists actually do is act like field mice, picking up this bit of string and that scrap of metal and configuring it all later into something entirely new, their way of processing the world by filtering it through time and experience. This is what “Hamnet” captures beautifully: Agnes’s lessons on plants, learned from her mother and repeated to her children, surface in Ophelia’s mouth. It’s handled with the kind of sensitivity that comes from artists who know how all of this works.\n\n## Editors’ Picks\n[![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/13\/fashion\/00ST-Date-Promo\/00ST-Date-Promo-thumbLarge-v2.jpg)Your 35 (New! Crowdsourced!) Dating Rules](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/12\/style\/modern-dating-rules.html)\n\n[![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/14\/multimedia\/14sp-gifts-letters-inyt\/14sp-gifts-letters-inyt-thumbLarge.jpg)Words of Love or Friendship Can Be a Gift](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/12\/style\/gift-handwritten-letters-stationery.html)\n\n[![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/12\/business\/12TrippedUp-illo\/12TrippedUp-illo-thumbLarge.jpg)Help! JetBlue Mangled My Vintage Louis Vuitton Bag and Won’t Pay Up.](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/12\/travel\/jetblue-luggage-damage-repairs.html)\n\nAdvertisement\n\n[SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/11\/26\/movies\/hamnet-review.html#after-pp_edpick)\n\nBuckley’s performance is ferocious and astounding, starting off strong and somehow picking up power as the movie goes along. There’s something so sonorous in her low, melodic voice that in the moment when she loses it entirely, in silent, screaming paroxysms of grief, it smacks you right in the gut. And while she’ll rightly get all of the attention as the core and heart of the film, Mescal also knocked me flat, particularly when he delivers Shakespeare’s own lines with the emotion that this version of Will would be feeling.\n\nThe parts of the film that feel beautifully full to overflowing are undercut, occasionally, by feelings of just a little *too* much, a shot or directorial choice that’s just a tad too precious. The most egregious example is the use of Max Richter’s song “On the Nature of Daylight” in a pivotal emotional moment. It’s a beautiful piece of music, somehow the saddest song in the world. But it’s been so overused by now (in “Arrival,” “Shutter Island” and “The Last of Us,” just to name a few of many) that the spell instantly breaks.\n\nCuriously, what isn’t in this film adaptation is the backdrop of the plague, other than the sickness that takes young Hamnet. Arguably that would have muddied the waters in the shortened length of a feature, so it’s understandable. Perhaps nothing would have been gained by that added historical reference.\n\nBut look around, and you’ll see there’s little appetite for pandemic art these days, just as there has been in the past. Yet you can also observe all the markings of a long, gray blankness, a lot of collective wounding that never really got worked out. Like Shakespeare himself, apparently, we find some things too painful to come at head-on. Sometimes you have to approach sorrow sideways to understand it; sometimes a play like “Hamlet,” or a movie like “Hamnet,” can show you how to move through those dark woods.\n\n**Hamnet**  \nRated PG-13 for the painful death of a child, and some mild language and sexual content. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters.\n\n#### Hamnet\nNYT Critic’s Pick\n\n[Find Tickets](https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/showtimes\/title\/tt14905854?ref_=ref_ext_NYT)\n\nWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.\n\nDirector\n\nChloé Zhao\n\nWriters\n\nChloé Zhao, Maggie O'Farrell\n\nStars\n\nJessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Zac Wishart, James Lintern, Joe Alwyn\n\nRating\n\nPG-13\n\nRunning Time\n\n2h 5m\n\nGenres\n\nBiography, Drama, History\n\nMovie data powered by IMDb.com\n\n[Alissa Wilkinson](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/by\/alissa-wilkinson) is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.\n\nA version of this article appears in print on Nov. 28, 2025, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Spinning ‘Hamlet’ From Love And Grief. [Order Reprints](https:\/\/nytimes.wrightsmedia.com\/) \\| [Today’s Paper](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/todayspaper) \\| [Subscribe](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/subscriptions\/Multiproduct\/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY)\n\nSee more on: [Jessie Buckley](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/topic\/jessie-buckley), [Chloe Zhao](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/topic\/chloe-zhao), [Maggie O'Farrell](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/topic\/maggie-ofarrell)\n\nRead 346 comments\n\n- Share full article\n- 346\n\n***\n## Explore More in TV and Movies\n### Not sure what to watch next? We can help.\n***\n- **‘Love Story’:** The series dramatizes the relationship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and [Carolyn Bessette](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/10\/arts\/television\/love-story-sarah-pidgeon-carolyn-bessette-kennedy.html), who married in 1996 and died a few years later. [Here’s what to know](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/12\/arts\/television\/love-story-john-f-kennedy-jr-carolyn-bessette.html).\n- **‘Neighbors’:** An HBO docuseries [explores neighborly drama](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/13\/arts\/television\/neighbors-hbo.html) in a well-armed and hyper-online America. [Read our critic’s review](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/13\/arts\/television\/neighbors-review-one-battle-after-another.html).\n- **‘Wuthering Heights’:** The director Emerald Fennell [narrates a sequence](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/13\/movies\/wuthering-heights-clip.html) from the film, which has a [casting controversy](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/13\/movies\/heathcliff-jacob-elordi-wuthering-heights-whitewashing.html) over the role of Heathcliff.\n- **Reality TV Dream Team:** The casting executives behind the Emmy-winning reality competition “Traitors” [reveal how they create a mad mix of modern celebrity](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/12\/arts\/television\/traitors-season-4-cast.html).\n- **Streaming Guides:** If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the [best offerings](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/article\/best-movies-netflix.html) [on Netflix](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/article\/best-tv-shows-netflix.html), [Max](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/article\/best-movies-hbo-max.html), [Disney+](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/article\/best-tv-shows-movies-disney-plus.html), [Amazon Prime](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/article\/best-movies-amazon-prime.html) and [Hulu](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/article\/best-movies-shows-hulu.html) to make choosing your next binge a little easier.\n\n## Related Content\n### [More in Movies](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/movies)\n- [‘Wuthering Heights’ Review: Margot Robbie, Amok on the Moors](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/12\/movies\/wuthering-heights-review-margot-robbie-jacob-elordi.html)\n  \n  ![Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as Catherine in “Wuthering Heights.”](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/11\/multimedia\/wuthering-heights-glhb-copy\/wuthering-heights-glhb-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Warner Bros. 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Pictures\n- [Bud Cort, Who Starred in 1971’s ‘Harold and Maude,’ Dies at 77](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/11\/movies\/bud-cort-dead.html)\n  \n  ![Bud Cort as the teenager Harold Chasen who falls in love with a 79-year-old woman in Hal Ashby’s movie “Harold and Maude,” from 1971. Panned at first, it became a cult classic.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/15\/multimedia\/11Cort--fpkm-print8\/11Cort--fpkm-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  CBS, via Getty Images\n\n### Editors’ Picks\n- [I Had Buyer’s Remorse. 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Food Stylist: Monica Pierini.\n- [Navalny Was Poisoned With Frog Toxin, European Governments Say](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/14\/world\/europe\/russia-navalny-poison.html)\n  \n  ![Aleksei A. Navalny in his office in Moscow in 2014. He was President Vladimir V. Putin’s most prominent political opponent when he died in a Russian prison in 2024.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/14\/multimedia\/14int-navalny-vwjp\/14int-navalny-vwjp-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Image by James Hill for The New York Times\n- [Share Your Memories and Photos of Six Flags Over the Years](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/12\/us\/six-flags-closings-memories-photos.html)\n  \n  ![Britney Spears riding Six Flags Magic Mountains’ “Scream” in 2003.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/11\/multimedia\/11XP-SIXFLAGS-CALLOUT\/11XP-SIXFLAGS-CALLOUT-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Mathew Imaging\/FilmMagic, via Getty Images\n- [Can I Cut Ties With a Friend Who Helped Me Through a Hard Time?](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/11\/magazine\/friend-cut-ties-ethics.html)\n  \n  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[Subscriptions](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/subscription?campaignId=37WXW)","attrs_readable_markdown":"Advertisement\n\n[SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/11\/26\/movies\/hamnet-review.html#after-top)\n\nCritic’s Pick\n\nJessie Buckley and Paul Mescal star in a heartbreaking adaptation of the best-selling novel.\n\n![A man and woman in period clothing stand close together in a mossy, dense forest, facing each other among fallen branches and green foliage.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/11\/28\/multimedia\/26cul-hamnet-review1-thfl\/26cul-hamnet-review1-thfl-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n\nJessie Buckley, left, and Paul Mescal in “Hamnet.”Credit...Agata Grzybowska\/Focus Features\n\nPublished Nov. 26, 2025Updated Dec. 1, 2025\n\nHamnet\n\nNYT Critic’s Pick\n\nDirected by Chloé Zhao\n\nBiography, Drama, History\n\nPG-13\n\n2h 5m\n\nMaggie O’Farrell’s book “[Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/07\/17\/books\/review\/hamnet-maggie-ofarrell.html)\" happened to be first published, in either an act of grace or a twisted cosmic joke, on March 31, 2020. These things can’t be planned. The novel tells an imagined story springing from a set of scant facts: The 11-year-old Hamnet Shakespeare died in 1596, and given this timing, the cause seems likely to have been the pandemic we now call the Black Plague. A few years later, Hamnet’s father’s greatest work, a play about grief, was first performed.\n\nDuring this era, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were often used interchangeably. Add to all of this one more oddity: Despite living in a world haunted by the bubonic plague nearly his whole life, Shakespeare almost [never addressed it directly in his work](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment\/what-shakespeare-actually-wrote-about-the-plague). Surely these facts, taken together, can’t be mere coincidence?\n\nIn “Hamnet,” O’Farrell tells a story of the Shakespeares and their grief. In the foreground are the lives of Agnes Shakespeare and her children, but also the work the bereaved father spun from his grief, and what this might have meant for the love between Agnes and Will. In the background is a pandemic-afflicted England, with quarantines and death and doctors in plague masks.\n\nNow, five years and a whole world later, the novel is a film. O’Farrell wrote the screenplay with the film’s director, Chloé Zhao, who infuses it with the same blend of heartache and beauty that pulsed in previous films like [“The Rider”](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/04\/11\/movies\/the-rider-review.html) and [“Nomadland.”](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/02\/18\/movies\/nomadland-review.html) Those movies were understated, and “Hamnet” is too, to a degree: Zhao makes much of an object on a table, a bit of wind whipping through branches. But “Hamnet” is also ardent and searing and brimming with emotion. That amount of heat can be tough to handle without veering into sentimentality. In a few places Zhao can’t, or won’t, keep it under control.\n\nBut “Hamnet” still works most of the time, in large part because of its stars, especially the magnificent Jessie Buckley, who plays Agnes. We first meet her curled up under a tree in the forest, like some wooded creature or forest sprite, clad in a red dress. Whenever Agnes is in the forest, Zhao plays with the visual proportions of human to tree such that she seems to have slipped into some fairy tale or mythic realm. Agnes comes from a line of women who can see beyond the visible, more a creature of the pagan domain than of the rapidly modernizing, far more Christian world in the village.\n\nShe meets Will (Paul Mescal), a young Latin tutor who scribbles fervently by candlelight, and their magnetic bond rapidly turns into a family. From there the story becomes one of joy, then acute grief, then the dull gray blankness of ongoing mourning, when nothing in the world will ever seemingly be set to rights. Agnes is the soul of the emotional arc, and Will is in London much of the time.\n\nWhere this all will end up is the story’s secret, but you know it will have to do with “Hamlet.” Any tale in which real life and love become the raw materials for art can slip very quickly into forehead-smacking cliché, with famous elements from the end product showing up in the character’s lives like little Easter eggs for us, the viewers in the know.\n\nThat is not “Hamnet,” and it couldn’t have been — “Hamlet,” after all, is about a dead father, not a dead son. What artists actually do is act like field mice, picking up this bit of string and that scrap of metal and configuring it all later into something entirely new, their way of processing the world by filtering it through time and experience. This is what “Hamnet” captures beautifully: Agnes’s lessons on plants, learned from her mother and repeated to her children, surface in Ophelia’s mouth. It’s handled with the kind of sensitivity that comes from artists who know how all of this works.\n\nBuckley’s performance is ferocious and astounding, starting off strong and somehow picking up power as the movie goes along. There’s something so sonorous in her low, melodic voice that in the moment when she loses it entirely, in silent, screaming paroxysms of grief, it smacks you right in the gut. And while she’ll rightly get all of the attention as the core and heart of the film, Mescal also knocked me flat, particularly when he delivers Shakespeare’s own lines with the emotion that this version of Will would be feeling.\n\nThe parts of the film that feel beautifully full to overflowing are undercut, occasionally, by feelings of just a little *too* much, a shot or directorial choice that’s just a tad too precious. The most egregious example is the use of Max Richter’s song “On the Nature of Daylight” in a pivotal emotional moment. It’s a beautiful piece of music, somehow the saddest song in the world. But it’s been so overused by now (in “Arrival,” “Shutter Island” and “The Last of Us,” just to name a few of many) that the spell instantly breaks.\n\nCuriously, what isn’t in this film adaptation is the backdrop of the plague, other than the sickness that takes young Hamnet. Arguably that would have muddied the waters in the shortened length of a feature, so it’s understandable. Perhaps nothing would have been gained by that added historical reference.\n\nBut look around, and you’ll see there’s little appetite for pandemic art these days, just as there has been in the past. Yet you can also observe all the markings of a long, gray blankness, a lot of collective wounding that never really got worked out. Like Shakespeare himself, apparently, we find some things too painful to come at head-on. Sometimes you have to approach sorrow sideways to understand it; sometimes a play like “Hamlet,” or a movie like “Hamnet,” can show you how to move through those dark woods.\n\n**Hamnet**  \nRated PG-13 for the painful death of a child, and some mild language and sexual content. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters.\n\n[Alissa Wilkinson](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/by\/alissa-wilkinson) is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.\n\nA version of this article appears in print on Nov. 28, 2025, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Spinning ‘Hamlet’ From Love And Grief. [Order Reprints](https:\/\/nytimes.wrightsmedia.com\/) \\| [Today’s Paper](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/todayspaper) \\| [Subscribe](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/subscriptions\/Multiproduct\/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY)\n\n## Related Content\n[More in Movies](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/movies)\n\n- ![Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as Catherine in “Wuthering Heights.”](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/11\/multimedia\/wuthering-heights-glhb-copy\/wuthering-heights-glhb-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Warner Bros. Pictures\n- ![Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in a scene from the new “Wuthering Heights.”](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/13\/multimedia\/healthcliff-explainer-gfph\/healthcliff-explainer-gfph-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Warner Bros.\n- ![Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as Catherine in “Wuthering Heights.”](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/11\/multimedia\/wuthering-heights-glhb\/wuthering-heights-glhb-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Warner Bros. Pictures\n- ![Bud Cort as the teenager Harold Chasen who falls in love with a 79-year-old woman in Hal Ashby’s movie “Harold and Maude,” from 1971. Panned at first, it became a cult classic.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/15\/multimedia\/11Cort--fpkm-print8\/11Cort--fpkm-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  CBS, via Getty Images\n\nEditors’ Picks\n\n- ![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/15\/fashion\/15ST-MODERN-REALESTATE-DELAMARTRE\/15ST-MODERN-REALESTATE-DELAMARTRE-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Brian Rea\n- ![Pat McGrath in 2024.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/12\/multimedia\/11ST-PAT-MCGRATH-swap-mqtj\/11ST-PAT-MCGRATH-swap-mqtj-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Yvonne Tnt\/BFA.com, via Shutterstock\n\nTrending in The Times\n\n- ![A Hermann’s tortoise of North Macedonia’s Golem Grad island, with an injury from a fall on its carapace.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/14\/multimedia\/14HS-tb-tortoises-stillpromo\/14HS-tb-tortoises-stillpromo-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Dragan Arsovski\n- ![Lawyers and wealth advisers in California are already drawing up plans to exempt assets from a proposed tax on billionaires, even though it may never become law. ](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/14\/multimedia\/14nat-ca-wealth-tax-mjtk\/14nat-ca-wealth-tax-mjtk-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times\n- ![With his stage work, the Swiss director-activist Milo Rau examines episodes of historical violence in an attempt to give audiences some measure of insight.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/14\/multimedia\/14cul-what-to-wear-lmzb\/14cul-what-to-wear-lmzb-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Aliona Kardash for The New York Times\n- ![Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan won the gold medal in men’s figure skating on Friday at the Winter Olympics in Milan.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/14\/multimedia\/14int-olympics-firstgolds-topart-jtqv\/14int-olympics-firstgolds-topart-jtqv-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Doug Mills\/The New York Times\n- ![A thin layer of spiced ground meat cooks quickly under the broiler when it’s spread onto pitas.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/13\/multimedia\/13FD-EARLY-IFTAR-1-cvmh\/13FD-EARLY-IFTAR-1-cvmh-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini.\n- ![Aleksei A. Navalny in his office in Moscow in 2014. He was President Vladimir V. Putin’s most prominent political opponent when he died in a Russian prison in 2024.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/14\/multimedia\/14int-navalny-vwjp\/14int-navalny-vwjp-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Image by James Hill for The New York Times\n- ![Britney Spears riding Six Flags Magic Mountains’ “Scream” in 2003.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/11\/multimedia\/11XP-SIXFLAGS-CALLOUT\/11XP-SIXFLAGS-CALLOUT-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Mathew Imaging\/FilmMagic, via Getty Images\n- ![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/11\/magazine\/11mag-ethicist-online\/11mag-ethicist-online-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Illustration by Tomi Um\n- ![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/14\/multimedia\/14dowd-zfkm\/14dowd-zfkm-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Photo Illustration by Philotheus Nisch for The New York Times\n- ![Unlock better sleep.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/15\/realestate\/11re-sleeping-with-other-people-ILLO\/11re-sleeping-with-other-people-ILLO-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Nicolas Ortega\n\nAdvertisement\n\n[SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/11\/26\/movies\/hamnet-review.html#after-bottom)","meta_canonical":null}

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Boilerpipe Text	Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Critic’s Pick Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal star in a heartbreaking adaptation of the best-selling novel. Jessie Buckley, left, and Paul Mescal in “Hamnet.” Credit... Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features Published Nov. 26, 2025 Updated Dec. 1, 2025 Hamnet NYT Critic’s Pick Directed by Chloé Zhao Biography, Drama, History PG-13 2h 5m Maggie O’Farrell’s book “ Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague " happened to be first published, in either an act of grace or a twisted cosmic joke, on March 31, 2020. These things can’t be planned. The novel tells an imagined story springing from a set of scant facts: The 11-year-old Hamnet Shakespeare died in 1596, and given this timing, the cause seems likely to have been the pandemic we now call the Black Plague. A few years later, Hamnet’s father’s greatest work, a play about grief, was first performed. During this era, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were often used interchangeably. Add to all of this one more oddity: Despite living in a world haunted by the bubonic plague nearly his whole life, Shakespeare almost never addressed it directly in his work . Surely these facts, taken together, can’t be mere coincidence? In “Hamnet,” O’Farrell tells a story of the Shakespeares and their grief. In the foreground are the lives of Agnes Shakespeare and her children, but also the work the bereaved father spun from his grief, and what this might have meant for the love between Agnes and Will. In the background is a pandemic-afflicted England, with quarantines and death and doctors in plague masks. Now, five years and a whole world later, the novel is a film. O’Farrell wrote the screenplay with the film’s director, Chloé Zhao, who infuses it with the same blend of heartache and beauty that pulsed in previous films like “The Rider” and “Nomadland.” Those movies were understated, and “Hamnet” is too, to a degree: Zhao makes much of an object on a table, a bit of wind whipping through branches. But “Hamnet” is also ardent and searing and brimming with emotion. That amount of heat can be tough to handle without veering into sentimentality. In a few places Zhao can’t, or won’t, keep it under control. But “Hamnet” still works most of the time, in large part because of its stars, especially the magnificent Jessie Buckley, who plays Agnes. We first meet her curled up under a tree in the forest, like some wooded creature or forest sprite, clad in a red dress. Whenever Agnes is in the forest, Zhao plays with the visual proportions of human to tree such that she seems to have slipped into some fairy tale or mythic realm. Agnes comes from a line of women who can see beyond the visible, more a creature of the pagan domain than of the rapidly modernizing, far more Christian world in the village. She meets Will (Paul Mescal), a young Latin tutor who scribbles fervently by candlelight, and their magnetic bond rapidly turns into a family. From there the story becomes one of joy, then acute grief, then the dull gray blankness of ongoing mourning, when nothing in the world will ever seemingly be set to rights. Agnes is the soul of the emotional arc, and Will is in London much of the time. Where this all will end up is the story’s secret, but you know it will have to do with “Hamlet.” Any tale in which real life and love become the raw materials for art can slip very quickly into forehead-smacking cliché, with famous elements from the end product showing up in the character’s lives like little Easter eggs for us, the viewers in the know. That is not “Hamnet,” and it couldn’t have been — “Hamlet,” after all, is about a dead father, not a dead son. What artists actually do is act like field mice, picking up this bit of string and that scrap of metal and configuring it all later into something entirely new, their way of processing the world by filtering it through time and experience. This is what “Hamnet” captures beautifully: Agnes’s lessons on plants, learned from her mother and repeated to her children, surface in Ophelia’s mouth. It’s handled with the kind of sensitivity that comes from artists who know how all of this works. Buckley’s performance is ferocious and astounding, starting off strong and somehow picking up power as the movie goes along. There’s something so sonorous in her low, melodic voice that in the moment when she loses it entirely, in silent, screaming paroxysms of grief, it smacks you right in the gut. And while she’ll rightly get all of the attention as the core and heart of the film, Mescal also knocked me flat, particularly when he delivers Shakespeare’s own lines with the emotion that this version of Will would be feeling. The parts of the film that feel beautifully full to overflowing are undercut, occasionally, by feelings of just a little too much, a shot or directorial choice that’s just a tad too precious. The most egregious example is the use of Max Richter’s song “On the Nature of Daylight” in a pivotal emotional moment. It’s a beautiful piece of music, somehow the saddest song in the world. But it’s been so overused by now (in “Arrival,” “Shutter Island” and “The Last of Us,” just to name a few of many) that the spell instantly breaks. Curiously, what isn’t in this film adaptation is the backdrop of the plague, other than the sickness that takes young Hamnet. Arguably that would have muddied the waters in the shortened length of a feature, so it’s understandable. Perhaps nothing would have been gained by that added historical reference. But look around, and you’ll see there’s little appetite for pandemic art these days, just as there has been in the past. Yet you can also observe all the markings of a long, gray blankness, a lot of collective wounding that never really got worked out. Like Shakespeare himself, apparently, we find some things too painful to come at head-on. Sometimes you have to approach sorrow sideways to understand it; sometimes a play like “Hamlet,” or a movie like “Hamnet,” can show you how to move through those dark woods. Hamnet Rated PG-13 for the painful death of a child, and some mild language and sexual content. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 28, 2025 , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Spinning ‘Hamlet’ From Love And Grief . Order Reprints \| Today’s Paper \| Subscribe Related Content More in Movies Warner Bros. Pictures Warner Bros. Warner Bros. Pictures CBS, via Getty Images Editors’ Picks Brian Rea Yvonne Tnt/BFA.com, via Shutterstock Trending in The Times Dragan Arsovski Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times Aliona Kardash for The New York Times Doug Mills/The New York Times Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini. Image by James Hill for The New York Times Mathew Imaging/FilmMagic, via Getty Images Illustration by Tomi Um Photo Illustration by Philotheus Nisch for The New York Times Nicolas Ortega Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Markdown	[Skip to content](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/movies/hamnet-review.html#site-content)[Skip to site index](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/movies/hamnet-review.html#site-index) Search & Section Navigation Section Navigation Search [Movies](https://www.nytimes.com/section/movies) [Log in](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fsubscription%2Fonboarding-offer%3FcampaignId%3D7JFJX%26EXIT_URI%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.nytimes.com%252F2025%252F11%252F26%252Fmovies%252Fhamnet-review.html&asset=masthead) Sunday, February 15, 2026 [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) [What to Watch](https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/what-to-watch) - [Oscar Nominees: Where to Stream](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/movies/oscar-nominees-2026-how-to-watch.html) - [‘Wuthering Heights’](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/movies/wuthering-heights-review-margot-robbie-jacob-elordi.html) - [‘Goat’](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/movies/goat-review.html) - [‘Crime 101’](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/movies/crime-101-review.html) - [‘Scarlet’](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/movies/scarlet-anime-hosoda-hamlet-review.html) - [‘Neighbors’](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/arts/television/neighbors-review-one-battle-after-another.html) Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/movies/hamnet-review.html#after-top) Supported by [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/movies/hamnet-review.html#after-sponsor) Critic’s Pick # ‘Hamnet’ Review: The Rest Is Silence Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal star in a heartbreaking adaptation of the best-selling novel. - Share full article - 346 ![A man and woman in period clothing stand close together in a mossy, dense forest, facing each other among fallen branches and green foliage.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/11/28/multimedia/26cul-hamnet-review1-thfl/26cul-hamnet-review1-thfl-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Jessie Buckley, left, and Paul Mescal in “Hamnet.”Credit...Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features [![Alissa Wilkinson](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/05/reader-center/author-alissa-wilkinson/author-alissa-wilkinson-thumbLarge.png)](https://www.nytimes.com/by/alissa-wilkinson) By [Alissa Wilkinson](https://www.nytimes.com/by/alissa-wilkinson) Published Nov. 26, 2025Updated Dec. 1, 2025 Hamnet NYT Critic’s Pick Directed by Chloé Zhao Biography, Drama, History PG-13 2h 5m [Find Tickets](https://www.imdb.com/showtimes/title/tt14905854?ref_=ref_ext_NYT) When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Maggie O’Farrell’s book “[Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/books/review/hamnet-maggie-ofarrell.html)" happened to be first published, in either an act of grace or a twisted cosmic joke, on March 31, 2020. These things can’t be planned. The novel tells an imagined story springing from a set of scant facts: The 11-year-old Hamnet Shakespeare died in 1596, and given this timing, the cause seems likely to have been the pandemic we now call the Black Plague. A few years later, Hamnet’s father’s greatest work, a play about grief, was first performed. During this era, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were often used interchangeably. Add to all of this one more oddity: Despite living in a world haunted by the bubonic plague nearly his whole life, Shakespeare almost [never addressed it directly in his work](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-shakespeare-actually-wrote-about-the-plague). Surely these facts, taken together, can’t be mere coincidence? In “Hamnet,” O’Farrell tells a story of the Shakespeares and their grief. In the foreground are the lives of Agnes Shakespeare and her children, but also the work the bereaved father spun from his grief, and what this might have meant for the love between Agnes and Will. In the background is a pandemic-afflicted England, with quarantines and death and doctors in plague masks. Now, five years and a whole world later, the novel is a film. O’Farrell wrote the screenplay with the film’s director, Chloé Zhao, who infuses it with the same blend of heartache and beauty that pulsed in previous films like [“The Rider”](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/movies/the-rider-review.html) and [“Nomadland.”](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/movies/nomadland-review.html) Those movies were understated, and “Hamnet” is too, to a degree: Zhao makes much of an object on a table, a bit of wind whipping through branches. But “Hamnet” is also ardent and searing and brimming with emotion. That amount of heat can be tough to handle without veering into sentimentality. In a few places Zhao can’t, or won’t, keep it under control. But “Hamnet” still works most of the time, in large part because of its stars, especially the magnificent Jessie Buckley, who plays Agnes. We first meet her curled up under a tree in the forest, like some wooded creature or forest sprite, clad in a red dress. Whenever Agnes is in the forest, Zhao plays with the visual proportions of human to tree such that she seems to have slipped into some fairy tale or mythic realm. Agnes comes from a line of women who can see beyond the visible, more a creature of the pagan domain than of the rapidly modernizing, far more Christian world in the village. She meets Will (Paul Mescal), a young Latin tutor who scribbles fervently by candlelight, and their magnetic bond rapidly turns into a family. From there the story becomes one of joy, then acute grief, then the dull gray blankness of ongoing mourning, when nothing in the world will ever seemingly be set to rights. Agnes is the soul of the emotional arc, and Will is in London much of the time. Where this all will end up is the story’s secret, but you know it will have to do with “Hamlet.” Any tale in which real life and love become the raw materials for art can slip very quickly into forehead-smacking cliché, with famous elements from the end product showing up in the character’s lives like little Easter eggs for us, the viewers in the know. That is not “Hamnet,” and it couldn’t have been — “Hamlet,” after all, is about a dead father, not a dead son. What artists actually do is act like field mice, picking up this bit of string and that scrap of metal and configuring it all later into something entirely new, their way of processing the world by filtering it through time and experience. This is what “Hamnet” captures beautifully: Agnes’s lessons on plants, learned from her mother and repeated to her children, surface in Ophelia’s mouth. It’s handled with the kind of sensitivity that comes from artists who know how all of this works. ## Editors’ Picks [![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/13/fashion/00ST-Date-Promo/00ST-Date-Promo-thumbLarge-v2.jpg)Your 35 (New! Crowdsourced!) Dating Rules](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/style/modern-dating-rules.html) [![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/14/multimedia/14sp-gifts-letters-inyt/14sp-gifts-letters-inyt-thumbLarge.jpg)Words of Love or Friendship Can Be a Gift](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/style/gift-handwritten-letters-stationery.html) [![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/12/business/12TrippedUp-illo/12TrippedUp-illo-thumbLarge.jpg)Help! JetBlue Mangled My Vintage Louis Vuitton Bag and Won’t Pay Up.](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/travel/jetblue-luggage-damage-repairs.html) Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/movies/hamnet-review.html#after-pp_edpick) Buckley’s performance is ferocious and astounding, starting off strong and somehow picking up power as the movie goes along. There’s something so sonorous in her low, melodic voice that in the moment when she loses it entirely, in silent, screaming paroxysms of grief, it smacks you right in the gut. And while she’ll rightly get all of the attention as the core and heart of the film, Mescal also knocked me flat, particularly when he delivers Shakespeare’s own lines with the emotion that this version of Will would be feeling. The parts of the film that feel beautifully full to overflowing are undercut, occasionally, by feelings of just a little too much, a shot or directorial choice that’s just a tad too precious. The most egregious example is the use of Max Richter’s song “On the Nature of Daylight” in a pivotal emotional moment. It’s a beautiful piece of music, somehow the saddest song in the world. But it’s been so overused by now (in “Arrival,” “Shutter Island” and “The Last of Us,” just to name a few of many) that the spell instantly breaks. Curiously, what isn’t in this film adaptation is the backdrop of the plague, other than the sickness that takes young Hamnet. Arguably that would have muddied the waters in the shortened length of a feature, so it’s understandable. Perhaps nothing would have been gained by that added historical reference. But look around, and you’ll see there’s little appetite for pandemic art these days, just as there has been in the past. Yet you can also observe all the markings of a long, gray blankness, a lot of collective wounding that never really got worked out. Like Shakespeare himself, apparently, we find some things too painful to come at head-on. Sometimes you have to approach sorrow sideways to understand it; sometimes a play like “Hamlet,” or a movie like “Hamnet,” can show you how to move through those dark woods. Hamnet Rated PG-13 for the painful death of a child, and some mild language and sexual content. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. #### Hamnet NYT Critic’s Pick [Find Tickets](https://www.imdb.com/showtimes/title/tt14905854?ref_=ref_ext_NYT) When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Director Chloé Zhao Writers Chloé Zhao, Maggie O'Farrell Stars Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Zac Wishart, James Lintern, Joe Alwyn Rating PG-13 Running Time 2h 5m Genres Biography, Drama, History Movie data powered by IMDb.com [Alissa Wilkinson](https://www.nytimes.com/by/alissa-wilkinson) is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 28, 2025, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Spinning ‘Hamlet’ From Love And Grief. [Order Reprints](https://nytimes.wrightsmedia.com/) \\| [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) \\| [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY) See more on: [Jessie Buckley](https://www.nytimes.com/topic/jessie-buckley), [Chloe Zhao](https://www.nytimes.com/topic/chloe-zhao), [Maggie O'Farrell](https://www.nytimes.com/topic/maggie-ofarrell) Read 346 comments - Share full article - 346 * ## Explore More in TV and Movies ### Not sure what to watch next? We can help. * - ‘Love Story’: The series dramatizes the relationship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and [Carolyn Bessette](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/arts/television/love-story-sarah-pidgeon-carolyn-bessette-kennedy.html), who married in 1996 and died a few years later. 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Readable Markdown	Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/movies/hamnet-review.html#after-top) Critic’s Pick Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal star in a heartbreaking adaptation of the best-selling novel. ![A man and woman in period clothing stand close together in a mossy, dense forest, facing each other among fallen branches and green foliage.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/11/28/multimedia/26cul-hamnet-review1-thfl/26cul-hamnet-review1-thfl-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Jessie Buckley, left, and Paul Mescal in “Hamnet.”Credit...Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features Published Nov. 26, 2025Updated Dec. 1, 2025 Hamnet NYT Critic’s Pick Directed by Chloé Zhao Biography, Drama, History PG-13 2h 5m Maggie O’Farrell’s book “[Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/books/review/hamnet-maggie-ofarrell.html)" happened to be first published, in either an act of grace or a twisted cosmic joke, on March 31, 2020. These things can’t be planned. The novel tells an imagined story springing from a set of scant facts: The 11-year-old Hamnet Shakespeare died in 1596, and given this timing, the cause seems likely to have been the pandemic we now call the Black Plague. A few years later, Hamnet’s father’s greatest work, a play about grief, was first performed. During this era, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were often used interchangeably. Add to all of this one more oddity: Despite living in a world haunted by the bubonic plague nearly his whole life, Shakespeare almost [never addressed it directly in his work](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-shakespeare-actually-wrote-about-the-plague). Surely these facts, taken together, can’t be mere coincidence? In “Hamnet,” O’Farrell tells a story of the Shakespeares and their grief. In the foreground are the lives of Agnes Shakespeare and her children, but also the work the bereaved father spun from his grief, and what this might have meant for the love between Agnes and Will. In the background is a pandemic-afflicted England, with quarantines and death and doctors in plague masks. Now, five years and a whole world later, the novel is a film. O’Farrell wrote the screenplay with the film’s director, Chloé Zhao, who infuses it with the same blend of heartache and beauty that pulsed in previous films like [“The Rider”](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/movies/the-rider-review.html) and [“Nomadland.”](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/movies/nomadland-review.html) Those movies were understated, and “Hamnet” is too, to a degree: Zhao makes much of an object on a table, a bit of wind whipping through branches. But “Hamnet” is also ardent and searing and brimming with emotion. That amount of heat can be tough to handle without veering into sentimentality. In a few places Zhao can’t, or won’t, keep it under control. But “Hamnet” still works most of the time, in large part because of its stars, especially the magnificent Jessie Buckley, who plays Agnes. We first meet her curled up under a tree in the forest, like some wooded creature or forest sprite, clad in a red dress. Whenever Agnes is in the forest, Zhao plays with the visual proportions of human to tree such that she seems to have slipped into some fairy tale or mythic realm. Agnes comes from a line of women who can see beyond the visible, more a creature of the pagan domain than of the rapidly modernizing, far more Christian world in the village. She meets Will (Paul Mescal), a young Latin tutor who scribbles fervently by candlelight, and their magnetic bond rapidly turns into a family. From there the story becomes one of joy, then acute grief, then the dull gray blankness of ongoing mourning, when nothing in the world will ever seemingly be set to rights. Agnes is the soul of the emotional arc, and Will is in London much of the time. Where this all will end up is the story’s secret, but you know it will have to do with “Hamlet.” Any tale in which real life and love become the raw materials for art can slip very quickly into forehead-smacking cliché, with famous elements from the end product showing up in the character’s lives like little Easter eggs for us, the viewers in the know. That is not “Hamnet,” and it couldn’t have been — “Hamlet,” after all, is about a dead father, not a dead son. What artists actually do is act like field mice, picking up this bit of string and that scrap of metal and configuring it all later into something entirely new, their way of processing the world by filtering it through time and experience. This is what “Hamnet” captures beautifully: Agnes’s lessons on plants, learned from her mother and repeated to her children, surface in Ophelia’s mouth. It’s handled with the kind of sensitivity that comes from artists who know how all of this works. Buckley’s performance is ferocious and astounding, starting off strong and somehow picking up power as the movie goes along. There’s something so sonorous in her low, melodic voice that in the moment when she loses it entirely, in silent, screaming paroxysms of grief, it smacks you right in the gut. And while she’ll rightly get all of the attention as the core and heart of the film, Mescal also knocked me flat, particularly when he delivers Shakespeare’s own lines with the emotion that this version of Will would be feeling. The parts of the film that feel beautifully full to overflowing are undercut, occasionally, by feelings of just a little too much, a shot or directorial choice that’s just a tad too precious. The most egregious example is the use of Max Richter’s song “On the Nature of Daylight” in a pivotal emotional moment. It’s a beautiful piece of music, somehow the saddest song in the world. But it’s been so overused by now (in “Arrival,” “Shutter Island” and “The Last of Us,” just to name a few of many) that the spell instantly breaks. Curiously, what isn’t in this film adaptation is the backdrop of the plague, other than the sickness that takes young Hamnet. Arguably that would have muddied the waters in the shortened length of a feature, so it’s understandable. Perhaps nothing would have been gained by that added historical reference. But look around, and you’ll see there’s little appetite for pandemic art these days, just as there has been in the past. Yet you can also observe all the markings of a long, gray blankness, a lot of collective wounding that never really got worked out. Like Shakespeare himself, apparently, we find some things too painful to come at head-on. Sometimes you have to approach sorrow sideways to understand it; sometimes a play like “Hamlet,” or a movie like “Hamnet,” can show you how to move through those dark woods. Hamnet Rated PG-13 for the painful death of a child, and some mild language and sexual content. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. [Alissa Wilkinson](https://www.nytimes.com/by/alissa-wilkinson) is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 28, 2025, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Spinning ‘Hamlet’ From Love And Grief. 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