It’s hard to imagine any other outcome than the victory of actress Jessie Buckley for “Hamnet” at the Golden Globes, next Sunday, January 11, in Los Angeles. It’s impossible not to see her triumph at the Oscars, a few weeks later. She is moving, inhabited, mysterious in the film by Chloé Zhao, Oscar-winning director for “Nomadland”.
The film, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, is a dive into the abyss of child grief. It is a fiction based on a few scattered biographical facts. Hamnet Shakespeare, the son of the famous playwright, died at the age of 11 in 1596. A few years later, his father wrote what would become his most famous play: Hamlet. At the time, the first names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable. For Maggie O’Farrell, and by extension for Chloé Zhao, this implies that Shakespeare’s best-known work was a way of mourning the loss of her son.
The heroine is Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare
The film stars Jessie Buckley as Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare. The latter is played by Paul Mescal. We don’t refer to him as Shakespeare on screen. He is not yet the great playwright who will mark History. He is a husband, a father, a teacher, an author. He is not the hero of Hamnet, but his wife.
Agnes is a wild creature, who seems to be one with the woods where we first meet her. It is said that she may be a witch. When she meets William’s gaze, their love is immediate, intense, obvious. They have children who fulfill them, although William sees little of them, busy building a reputation as a poet in London. We easily believe in their happiness. We see them happy. It’s beautiful, solid and joyful. Halfway through the film, the mood suddenly changes. Life takes a child from them and sadness sucks them into a bottomless pit.
Jessie Buckley doesn’t play, she “is”
A little earlier on the screen, Jessie Buckley amazed us with a childbirth scene as powerful as the one delivered by Vanessa Kirby in “Pieces of a woman”. This is nothing compared to the absolutely heartbreaking scene of Hamnet’s death. Jessie Buckley goes through all the emotions: panic, hope, astonishment. She grabs us by the guts and twists them with her animal cries in agony and her shocked silences.
When we asked Jessie Buckley how she managed to be so fair in such an emotionally violent scene, she replied: “I don’t want to play, I want to be. » We couldn’t put it any other way. She does not play this devastated mother, who has just had a part of herself amputated; she is.
A film from another time, about love, death and mourning
“At that point in filming, we were a team. And I think I was completely in love with that team. We were focused on the vibrations that this life together represented, it was incredibly intense but there was also a lightness. The whole point of storytelling is to create relationships with the people who are with you on screen, so that those relationships then affect those who will see them. So how did I play this scene? I let myself go, I guess…” she continues.
“Hamnet” is a film from another time but which addresses universal and timeless subjects. It talks about life, death, love and how everyone grieves. It’s a film that reminds Jessie Buckley of how “we are vulnerable, fragile and alive”. We have to wait until the last minutes to understand the link between the son’s death and the father’s work. We dare you not to cry. See it in American cinemas now. “Hamnet” will be released in France on Wednesday January 21, 2026.
