Hamnet lands on Netflix July 6 with the best performance of Jessie Buckley's career

Chloé Zhao's Hamnet reaches Netflix in the United States on July 6, which means the film that spent last winter making audiences cry in theaters is now two clicks away for anyone with a subscription. It opened in limited release in late November, went wide on December 5, pulled in about $88 million against a budget in the mid-thirties, collected eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, and won Jessie Buckley nearly every Best Actress prize going. If you skipped it because a two-hour movie about the death of a child sounded like homework, here is the case for pressing play anyway.

The film adapts Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 novel, and O'Farrell co-wrote the screenplay with Zhao. The premise sounds academic. In 1596 Stratford, William Shakespeare and his wife lose their eleven-year-old son Hamnet to plague, and a few years later the grieving father writes a tragedy with a nearly identical name. What Zhao makes of that is not a literary puzzle box. It is a portrait of a marriage under the worst pressure there is, told mostly from the wife's side.

Buckley is the reason to watch

Buckley plays Agnes, the film's name for Anne Hathaway, and she carries the whole thing. The New York Post's Johnny Oleksinski called her "thunderous, playful, grounded and ethereal," and that reads as accurate rather than as blurb. She plays Agnes as a woman who reads people and herbs and hawks with total confidence, then watches all of that knowledge fail her at the one moment it counts. Paul Mescal's Shakespeare is quieter and more recessive, a man who copes by leaving. It is the less showy role, and a couple of critics found it familiar ground for him, but it works because he hands the screen to her.

Zhao shoots the domestic scenes the way she shot Nomadland, close to skin and weather, with Łukasz Żal's camera finding faces in low light and Max Richter's score, including his much-used "On the Nature of Daylight," doing a lot of the lifting. When the film stays in that register, a family cooking and arguing and grieving in cramped rooms, it is close to unimpeachable.

It is not flawless. Zhao keeps reaching for the mystical: a witchy forest, a recurring hawk, visions at deathbeds. Some of it is lovely and some of it plays like a nature documentary wandered onto the set. The Wall Street Journal's Kyle Smith called the whole thing "quintessential Oscar bait," and while that is too harsh, you can see what set him off. The movie wants you to weep, and it is not shy about arranging the furniture to get you there. Then it earns the tears anyway.

The finale (spoilers ahead)

Spoilers for the ending follow.

The last stretch moves to London for the first performance of Hamlet at the Globe. Agnes walks in braced for insult, certain her dead son's name has been turned into a show. Instead she watches her husband come on as the Ghost, a father mourning a son, and understands the play is an act of grief rather than exploitation. During the death scene she reaches out for the actor's hand the way she once reached for William's, and the audience around her reaches too. For a moment she sees Hamnet on that stage, and for the first time in the film she smiles. It is a huge, unashamed swing, and Buckley plays it so precisely that it lands as release instead of manipulation. Bilge Ebiri at Vulture called Hamnet "the most emotionally shattering movie I've seen in years." That closing scene is why.

The verdict

Hamnet is a superbly acted, deeply felt movie that now and then mistakes atmosphere for depth, then flattens the objection with one of the best closing scenes of the year. See it for Buckley. Keep tissues nearby, and do not watch it on a phone.

BCN score: 88 out of 100.