Description
In late 16th-century England, Agnes, a healer sensitive to the world around her, builds a home with William, a local tutor and aspiring playwright. As their lives fracture, they are tested by distance, silence, and grief.
The film is adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s poetic novel, which is one of the most acclaimed bestsellers of the 21st Century. The other key figure behind the camera is the director and co-writer, Chloé Zhao (O’Farrell herself is the other co-writer), who made the Oscar-winning Nomadland. In front of the camera, the film boasts two of Ireland’s most magnetic young actors, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. And there is another creative genius involved: William Shakespeare. The conceit of the novel and the film is that the tragic death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son – the titular Hamnet – fed into the writing of the greatest play in the English language, Hamlet. In Elizabethan England, an opening caption informs us, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable.
