It is no surprise that William Shakespeare and the reference to his work create the great divide. We either remember the forcible exposure to his prose at a time when we barely understood it, think high school essays on Romeo and Juliet, or we find it tells us everything about all the depths of human suffering and the deepest sense of love.

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet artistically and intimately details William Shakespeare, played by Paul Mescal, and his wife Agnes’, played by Jessie Buckley, marriage and parenthood. They navigate the very uncomfortable truth of death and the toil it takes on the two things we bring to life in this world: art and children. Through the death of their beloved youngest son Hamnet, both characters have to grapple with an unimaginable reality, and face their grief in their seemingly different ways that test the bounds of their marriage vows. Zhao has inadvertently created a film where not a single person in the crowd is left with dry eyes after.

Throughout the movie, the character that pulled us the closest to the beating heart of the film, is the fiery and clad in red mother, Agnes. She is peculiarly remembered in history largely because of the singular mention of her name in her late husband’s will. Historians have tended to favor Shakespeare while, in turn, casting Agnes in an unfavorable light, making one wonder if she was even allowed an identity of her own.

Here we have a woman who bleeds and breaths with the very nature that she grew up revering; she is exactly the counterpart that would make sense for Shakepsear to have. As Zhao herself said in an interview with Exeposé, Agnes is the earth that grounds the family and the tender hearth that hums beneath the story. In contrast, William is the pale sky, always up in his head and as gentle and turbulent as the wind. Aside from the incredible cinematography from Łukasz Żal, the screenplay co-written and based off of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel by the same name, and the performances of the cast, there is incredible artistry in conveying an emotion most of us never quite want to feel as viscerally as this film forces us to. There have been critics claiming that the level of grief this film explores pushes it into uncomfortably dramatic scenarios, but this limits the message of the story altogether and often misunderstands Zhao’s intention.

Zhao’s goal here is not to aestheticise grief or overinflate the experience, nor to render it palatable for an audience trained to expect some sort of narrative consolation. The discomfort is the whole point. Grief here is a state of a person's condition: for Agnes, it is one that stalls time, fractures the language of her life; for William, it is one that leaves him more lost than ever. What feels excessive to some viewers is precisely what grief is when it is not tidied up by explanation. The film understands loss as something that does not deepen character so much as hollow it out. It is not about who they become after or what they have ‘learned’ from the grief as if it were merely a plot device leading to a tidied resolution, it is one that leaves behind a silence that the audience has to sit with.

This is why Agnes does not have to “process” Hamnet’s death cleanly; she survives it through her innate connection to life, in touch, in an almost feral attentiveness to the living. Even through the heartbreak of that connection not saving her son when he needed it most, she still spares the love harboured for her surviving children. There is such a tender infancy in Agnes and William’s children as these wild, carefree, and gentle children who reflect the best of their parents, which stabs the gut of loss even deeper. It is what makes William, by contrast, abstracts his grief, turning Hamnet’s absence into metaphor. William channels all of his sorrow into the cannonic father figure of Hamlet that will outlive him through his art. The tension between Agnes and William is almost epistemological: what does it mean to truly know pain, who has the authority to interpret or translate it, and how does it exist beyond the confines of their own bodies and minds?

Shakespeare’s later work has long been read through the lens of Hamnet’s death, as though grief were merely a resource, some dark well to be drawn from. Zhao clearly resists this romanticisation and instead poses the idea that art does not redeem the loss or shape it into a higher form of being, it coexists with it, and sometimes even exploits it. The film becomes less about Shakespeare, the genius, and more about the violence required to sustain the very genius himself. In doing so, it creates a story with something rarer than just emotional catharsis. Instead, it honors the process of loss without asking for any justification. By the time “to be or not to be” reaches the page, love has already bled into language, and language has agreed to carry the body far beyond the borders of the cinema walls, and further from the stage.