Why ‘Hamnet’ Works: The Hidden Architecture of Grief
Director Chloé Zhao pulls off a magnificent sleight-of-hand in Hamnet. Audiences arrive expecting a Shakespeare biopic—the story of how the Bard wrote his greatest play. Instead, Zhao delivers something far more profound: a mother’s journey through unbearable loss. Will Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) is not the protagonist; he’s the supporting character in his wife’s transformation. This structural choice—hiding Agnes’s story inside what appears to be Will’s—mirrors the film’s central theme: the most powerful forces often work invisibly, like grief reshaping a soul from within. Agnes (Jessie Buckley) commands the screen not through dramatic proclamations but through her fierce, failing attempts to control what cannot be controlled. By the time we reach the Globe Theatre in the final act, we realise we’ve been watching Agnes’s story all along, and Shakespeare’s genius was simply the container that made her healing visible.
Agnes is a woman cursed with prophetic gifts. She sees what’s coming and believes this obligates her to prevent it. She reads people’s needs before they voice them. She sends Will to London, knowing she’ll lose him, because she must sacrifice her needs to save his dreams. She applies every remedy, every herb, every ritual to save her children. Her identity is built on being the one who heals, who helps, who fixes. The film’s devastating insight: this compulsion to control through caring is itself a cage. Watch the scene where she prepares Hamnet’s body alone, refusing all help—even in death, she must maintain control. The irony cuts deep: the one who saves everyone cannot save herself, and cannot accept being saved. She orchestrates everyone else’s lives while her own withers from lack of reciprocal care. This is her true tragedy, more than Hamnet’s death: she’s trapped in a role that isolates her from the very love she craves.
The film has mathematical precision in its architecture. The plague arrives in Stratford exactly halfway through the story—the moment when all her gifts, all her remedies, all her control meet their absolute limit. Before this point, she’s been actively shaping events: choosing Will over her father’s objections, birthing children, managing the household, and the glove business. After this point, everything she does fails. The buboes on Judith’s neck are the physical manifestation of an undeniable truth: death has arrived and cannot be healed away. Agnes tries everything—cool cloths, prayers, bargaining with God, even attempting to take the plague into herself. Nothing works. This midpoint reversal isn’t arbitrary; it’s where Agnes must shift from trying to force outcomes to learning to allow what is. The plague doesn’t care about her herbs or her visions or her desperate maternal will. This is the hinge on which her entire character arc turns.
Agnes and Will process grief through opposite modes. Agnes feels everything directly—she holds Hamnet’s dying body, she sews his shroud with her own hands, she sits curved over him listening for any sign of life returning. Will cannot do this. He flees to London and processes through words, through intellect, through the safety of art. Neither mode is wrong; they’re both valid human responses to unbearable loss. But the film shows us that transformation requires both: feeling without thinking traps Agnes in raw suffering; thinking without feeling traps Will in detached observation. They become strangers in grief, each unable to reach the other across the chasm of their different coping mechanisms. The play becomes the bridge—Will’s intellectual processing transformed into something Agnes can witness emotionally. When she sits in the Globe Theatre watching her son’s death performed, she’s finally receiving what Will created, and he’s finally offering what he couldn’t say directly.
The film’s most haunting mystery: why did Hamnet lie down with his sick sister? The screenplay doesn’t explain it overtly, but the implication is clear—he took the plague onto himself. This young boy, raised by a mother who taught him that love means helping, enacted the purest form of that teaching: giving his life so his sister could live. It’s the ultimate act of selfless love, except it’s offered freely, not compulsively. Hamnet doesn’t try to control or fix—he simply lies down beside Judith and accepts what comes. The twins were inseparable; perhaps he couldn’t bear a world where only one of them existed. This is what Agnes must learn from her son’s death: true love isn’t preventing suffering or controlling outcomes. Its presence. It’s allowing. It’s the courage to lie down beside someone in their darkness and let fate unfold. Hamnet understood this at eleven years old. Agnes must learn it through losing him.
When Agnes watches Hamlet at the Globe, she’s participating in an ancient ritual—the transformation of private grief into public meaning. The play takes her most intimate loss and makes it universal. Strangers weep together, experiencing their own griefs through her story. This is why Will’s artistic response isn’t a betrayal or an exploitation; it’s an offering. He couldn’t stay present for the death itself, but he could create a vessel for the grief that allows Agnes to finally release it. The scene where Ophelia gives out flowers while singing about death—“He will never come again”—mirrors Agnes’s own mad grief. But instead of being alone with it, she’s surrounded by a community of witnesses. The dirty, scarred faces crying with her validate that her loss matters. When Hamlet holds Yorick’s skull and speaks of death’s democracy, Agnes sees her own son’s mortality reflected back to her through art’s clarifying lens. The play doesn’t replace what’s lost, but it transforms unbearable isolation into shared meaning. For the first time since Hamnet died, Agnes is not alone with her grief.
The film opens with a red egg—a falcon’s egg glowing in Agnes’s palm like a promise. It appears again at the end, but now it’s cracked. This isn’t cheap symbolism; it’s the film’s thesis statement about death and grief. In the Celtic and pagan worldview that permeates the film—Agnes’s herbal knowledge, her forest rituals, her reading of natural signs—death isn’t ending but transformation. The forest doesn’t mourn winter; it surrenders to it, knowing spring returns. When Agnes releases Hamnet in the final scene, letting him walk into the void that “welcomes him gently,” she’s not giving up; she’s accepting the natural cycle. The egg cracks not because something’s broken, but because new life requires the shell to break. Hamnet’s physical death enables Hamlet’s artistic birth. Agnes’s compulsive control must die so her capacity to receive love can be born. The film ends not with resurrection or consolation, but with something more honest: the acceptance that loss transforms us whether we resist or surrender, but only surrender allows the transformation to birth something new. Agnes doesn’t defeat grief. She learns to let it crack her open.
Andrew Higgs is getting his new book, The Alchemy of Screen Acting: Building a Sustainable Career in 21 Steps, ready for publication. Subscribers to Substack receive practical insights on screen acting and career development, and will be the first to know when the book becomes available. Subscribe for free using the link above.