The latest

Three viewings of Hamnet shifted Sakina Khaled’s attention from the story to the work of image, music and silence, without diminishing its emotional force. She watched it twice in cinemas, then chose it while browsing films aboard a flight to the UAE. Directed by Chloé Zhao and adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, the film imagines the life of William Shakespeare’s family after the death of his son Hamnet at 11, and the echo that loss might have left in Hamlet.

Details

• Agnes at centre: Rather than making Shakespeare’s literary genius its subject, the film stays closest to his wife, Agnes, and to motherhood and grief that words cannot contain. Jessie Buckley becomes its centre, delivering what Khaled describes as a physically complete experience of fear, love and sorrow rather than a conventional performance.
• Before the legend: Paul Mescal portrays William as an ambitious young husband and father seeking a place in London while his family remains in Stratford. He is shown before statues, textbooks and renown: a man as helpless before death as anyone else. Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn and Jacobi Jupe also appear.
• Nature and silence: Zhao resists easy melodrama by keeping the camera close to people and nature. Trees, soil, light, animals and faces become part of the film’s psychological world, not scenery. Long looks, hand movements and silence are trusted to carry what pages of dialogue might explain.
• Visual texture: Łukasz Żal’s cinematography and Max Richter’s score give the film a quality suspended between reality and memory. On repeat viewing, the construction of images, timing of music and empty space around characters become more visible, even when every narrative turn is already known.
• Names as bridge: The likeness between Hamnet and Hamlet serves as a bridge from the dead son to the artwork. The names were historically used in closely related forms in England, and the film turns that detail into a larger human question: whether art can return the lost, even for minutes onstage.
• A shape for sorrow: In the final section, theatre ceases to be merely where Shakespeare presents a new work. It becomes the place where grief takes visible form and where an event in a small home becomes words that endure for centuries. Hamlet is not framed simply as disguised autobiography; instead, writing is imagined as somewhere sorrow can be placed.

Between the lines

The film’s effect changes with repetition: suspense recedes while gestures, composition, music and silence move forward. That helps explain why Khaled distinguishes Hamnet from films that end with their credits; its idea—that art may preserve a trace of those lost—continues after the screen goes dark.

What’s next

Khaled says a fourth viewing is likely, extending her return to a film whose ending and emotional trajectory she now knows in full.