“All the world’s a stage,” and Jessie Buckley stands firmly at its center. Her performance as Agnes is magnetic—at once restrained and overwhelming, grounded yet almost otherworldly. Like in Hamnet, the film orbits her presence, but here that gravity is carried almost entirely through Buckley’s performance. She shapes the emotional rhythm of the film, bending scenes around her grief, her silence, and her intensity.

Paul Mescal delivers a strong performance as Shakespeare, but he exists more as a counterweight than an equal force. His grief is quieter, more distant—felt in absence as much as presence—where Buckley’s is immediate and consuming. The imbalance works, though it makes the film feel less like a shared tragedy and more like a singular descent into Agnes’s interior world.

Visually, the film is striking. Nearly every frame feels staged, as if the characters are already part of a performance they cannot escape. Interiors are tight, dim, and suffocating, reinforcing Agnes’s growing sense of confinement, while the woods are shot with fluid, sweeping movement—untamed and expansive, echoing the freedom she once had. This contrast gives the film a physical sense of emotional space: grief as something that closes in.

As an adaptation, some of what made the novel so powerful is inevitably lost. Much of the supporting cast is reduced to the margins, and the deeply internal exploration of grief—so central to O’Farrell’s writing—is compressed into what the actors can express on screen. Agnes’s oracular, almost mystical qualities are also toned down, grounding the film in a more literal realism that, while effective, strips away some of her ambiguity and mythic presence.

What the film adds, however, is its most compelling idea: grief as performance, and performance as a means of understanding grief. The staging of Hamlet becomes the emotional centerpiece, reframing William Shakespeare’s work as an act of mourning. Watching Agnes recognize her own loss reflected back at her is where the film fully crystallizes. It’s a more explicit connection than the novel makes, but it lands because of how fully Buckley commits to it.

Jacobi Jupe is quietly devastating as Hamnet, bringing a softness and innocence that lingers even after he’s gone. His presence gives the film its emotional anchor, making the absence that follows feel tangible.

There are moments that feel more symbolic than fully integrated (a strange, almost surreal element in the woods that gestures toward metaphor more than meaning), but they don’t significantly detract from the overall experience. If anything, they reinforce the film’s interest in myth, nature, and the intangible forces shaping Agnes’s world.

Ultimately, Hamnet is intimate to the point of suffocation. It compresses grief into something close and inescapable, asking the audience not just to observe it, but to sit inside it. Through Buckley’s performance and the film’s carefully constructed visual language, it suggests that grief, when shared and understood, can be transformed—if not into something beautiful, then at least into something enduring.

Favorite Scene: Agnes Watching Hamlet

It’s the film’s emotional apex, and understandably so. Buckley’s performance unfolds in layers—recognition, resistance, devastation, and finally a kind of fragile understanding. The staging of the play, the crowd reaching toward Hamlet, and Mescal’s strongest moments all converge here. It’s where the boundary between art and life collapses, and where the film’s central idea—that grief can be translated, shared, and witnessed—fully comes into focus