Dir: Chloé Zhao, UK/US, 2025, 126 mins
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Jacobi Jupe, Joe Alwyn
Review by Carol Allen
Maybe that is because of the closer collaboration O’Farrell enjoyed working on her first screenplay as co-writer with director Zhao.
Jesse Buckley plays Agnes, a healer, herbalist and something of wild child of nature, regarded with suspicion by her community and fascination by the teenage Will Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), who falls in love with her. When Agnes falls pregnant the couple get married, despite disapproval from both families. Their first child Susannah is born, followed soon by twins Hamnet and Judith. With Agnes’s support Will goes to London to seek his fortune but while he is away the plague strikes, first Judith and then Hamnet. Judith recovers. Hamnet dies. And the real meat of the story is the way the couple are nearly destroyed by the loss of their son and O’Farrell’s imaginative leap that it was out of this personal tragedy that Shakespeare wrote one of the best known plays in the English language.
Buckley is terrific as Agnes – convincing as the nature loving young woman Will falls for and heart breaking as the distraught mother, who cannot get over the loss of her child. While not exactly convincing as a love struck teenager, Mescal is impressive as the maturing Will, who escapes from his dominating father’s boring glove making business to the grubby glamour of London, only to be devastated by a tragedy which he turns into art to heal his loss. The twins make much ado about being identical, though Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet and Olivia Lynes as Judith are not. The strong affection between them is however convincing and young Jupe does a good job of charming us, so we too feel the pain of losing him. There are also strong performances from Joe Alwyn as Agnes’s supportive brother and Emily Watson as Will’s mother.
The film wisely avoids devoting too much attention to Will’s life in London theatre until the powerful climax of the tale, when Agnes, angry at hearing Will has turned their tragedy into a mere entertainment, attends the first performance of Hamlet at the Globe theatre. Will, as it appears he did in life, plays the ghost of Hamlet’s father and through his onstage interaction with Hamlet, played by Jacobi’s elder brother Noah (who was so good in the Quiet Place films), we see the links and parallels O’Farrell has found between real life pain and art. The sequence is a brilliant piece of cinema
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