Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025)

Hamlet (Aneil Keira, 2025)

I guess I confess to having not read the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, so I don’t know why of the clumsinesses are Hollywood additions. Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) is the stuck at home wife in the 1590s, whilst hubby William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) is gallivanting around Shoreditch and the South Bank. All she has to look forward to is childrearing and his second-best bed.

He, meanwhile, is struggling to be inspired and scribbles away on his tragedies – and this leads to all sorts of distractions as you ponder if his children know those lines to Macbeth which may actually be interpolations from Thomas Middleton and whether those bits of Romeo and Juliet were taken from whatever version he was rewriting. Frankly, what happens in London should stay in London, but I guess if you have reconstructed a Globe (checks theatre history … 1599), you want to use it. But there’s the cringe you always get with author biopics. (Did I imagine the scene in some T. S. Eliot film where someone says, “April, that’s bloody cruel?”)

And so, we are left with the problem of a film all about a marginalised woman. Agne/Anne, who manages to find catharsis because her hubby has found an ancient Scandinavian text he can dramatize with a character named faintly like their son? Hubby is sad, after all, so I’m fine.

There’s a whiff of folk horror in here that never quite pays off, and the battle between folk and contemporary medicine is interesting, but a fine performance (which may well get the Oscar) is undercut by the film just trying too hard.

So, a coincidence, another version of Hamlet is on screen, some several days shorter than Branagh’s 1996 version and a little longer than Hamlet liikemaailmassa (Aki Kaurismäki, 1987). I found myself shouting at a stupid interviewer who asked Riz Ahmed (Hamlet) and Aneil Keira (director) if they might make a historically authentic version. What, set in thirteenth century Denmark.

So, Hamlet’s father has been killed, and he suspects his uncle Claudius (Art Malik) and mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha) of having a hand in it, or rather a bottle of poison in it. His version of Columbo is to feign madness and avoid being killed himself in contemporary London.

Let’s not go full textual history here – there’s a Bad Quarto, which I think I saw once, and various other Quartos and Folios, so we often have a pick and mix version of the play. Trimmed down to the magic ninety minutes or so, this is thriller speed, and any longer and the handheld shaky hand would have been unbearable. Much of the play transposes fine, also so speeches have been shuffled and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are cut, and Polonius (Timothy Spall) doesn’t get to be boring and longwinded and is somewhat old school heavy.

I can see a franchise here – a version of Macbeth next and King Lear in twenty years (although Ahmed is probably a couple of decades too old to be Hamlet). And there are various easter eggs you can take or leave.