The Spiritual Shakespeare of Chloé Zhao's Hamnet
Chloé Zhao's Shakespeare, played by Paul Mescal, presents a more spiritual figure, wrestling with elemental forces, mortality, and ghosts.
Published on Feb 23, 2026
This contains key story elements from Chloé Zhao's Hamnet (2025).
A powerful reboot and re-telling of classical works is to show them as if the world is hearing them for the first time. This happens with the timeless Hamlet, which bears the immortal "to be or not to be" monologue. The play and its speech have been so often repeated to the point of cliché.
Chloé Zhao takes us back to its context and to its namesake, Shakespeare's deceased son, Hamnet. This brings us to Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, the Academy Award frontrunner and adaptation of the novel of the same name by Maggie O'Farrell.
Much like many versions of Hamlet, there have been many versions of the Bard himself across different media, as Shakespeare is perhaps the most documented author in history. Each version presents a different person. Shakespeare in Love shows him as a talented, seductive, and romantic bohemian, played by Joseph Fiennes. In the musical Something Rotten!, he is portrayed by Christian Borle as a poser celebrity who plagiarizes Hamlet from the true geniuses, Nick and Nigel Bottom.
Most similarly, Kenneth Branagh's "All is true" covers aspects of Shakespeare's later life and grief for Hamnet, but through the lens of writer's block, retirement, and legacy. Each of these versions focuses on specific facets of the great artist, changing his relationship with his words and, by extension, our perspective on them. While Branagh humanizes Shakespeare and Borle fuels doubt, all these versions recognize his immense talent and contribution to literature. Chloé Zhao's Shakespeare, played by Paul Mescal, presents a more spiritual figure, wrestling with elemental forces, mortality, and ghosts.
By the end, he discovers his own "magic" through his literary talents, adding a more supernatural dimension to Shakespeare's words. Both Zhao and O'Farrell create a new Shakespeare by contrasting him with his wife, Agnes Hathaway. Agnes regularly tends to her hawk, gathers herbs, recites old rhymes, prefers to give birth in the forest, and heeds druidic beliefs. She invokes these practices most emphatically during scenes of childbirth—to Susanna, and later to her twins, Judith and Hamnet. For these beliefs, she is cast as an outsider, even called a "daughter of a witch." She represents the superstitious society they lived in.
Though it is unclear whether she had actual supernatural influence, she believed that maintaining a relationship with nature was the best means of living. Zhao admits to deliberately blending Eastern philosophy, such as Daoism, with the English countryside of Stratford-upon-Avon. In an essay published in the Conversation, Yan Yan Hong cites Zhao's assignment of different Chakras to each spouse. Agnes has red or root chakra which represents strength and survival. This explains her focus on keeping her children alive through warmth and connection with nature.
The world before Hamlet was highly volatile, and life was often short due to illness and plague. Shakespeare's mother even says, "You should always be prepared for your children to die." Agnes often uses her touch to care for her family, especially during the birth of her children and each of their near death. What of Shakespeare's own spiritual power? William is assigned blue or throat chakra which represents clarity and communication. Of course, this refers to his capacity as a storyteller and poet. However, before his grief, Shakespeare struggled to find words even in his courtship with Agnes and suffered writer's block throughout their eventual marriage.
Ironically, today he is known for inventing a huge portion of the words and expressions in the modern English language. This is similar to the Bible's Logos, where God—or Yahweh—creates meaning through the word: "In the beginning was the word." It is through words that the universe was ordered, given clarity and meaning. Words themselves become their own form of magical power, not in the sense of controlling the elements or having power over death, but rather as tools that facilitate understanding and psychologically overcome trauma, grief, and human suffering. Hamlet is considered Shakespeare's masterpiece, both as a play and as a character. Harold Bloom famously proclaimed that Shakespeare "invented the human" as through characters like Hamlet, he made characters able to reflect and perceive themselves.
This invention allows for greater potential power for humanity to understand itself. This ability unfolds not only in a psychological understanding but to an almost supernatural degree of cognition. The "To be or not to be" monologue is a reflection on mortality, asking why one should continue to live when doing so means bearing more suffering. To Mescal's Shakespeare, this speech becomes more than a philosophical puzzle that many actors as the Danish prince perform amid madness. It becomes a father's attempt to understand his son's death. Despite his absence during Hamnet's passing, Shakespeare comes to understand his son well enough to imagine him as someone who chose to die. Rather than remaining passive, Zhao and O'Farrell give Hamnet agency by having him willingly give up his life to save his twin sister, Judith.
Agnes even claims that he had tricked death, as if Hamnet possessed spiritual powers of his own. Of course, the audience is aware of this but his father was not. His play becomes, among other things, an act of posthumous communion with a child he failed to know. During the first staging of Hamlet, Shakespeare himself played the ghost of Hamlet's father, the reverse of his personal reality. As an actor on stage, he embodied the mortal separation from his son and ritually simulated talking and touching his son as if alive. At the film's conclusion, Agnes reaches out her hand to Hamlet's actor, surprising him and breaking the fourth wall. As Hamlet takes her hand, the rest of the crowd does the same, transforming the moment into a ritual of communion.
While Hamlet was, on a personal level, a father's response to grief, each performance becomes an act of transformation—turning the ghost of a dead son into a symbol of humanity's enduring struggle with mortality. More than "magical" spells, Shakespeare's words and plays become prayers. Rather than subjugating elements or having the power over life and death, they become mantras of clarity and alignment to what is beyond one's control. Though they speak little of a higher power or deity, these words connect people together fundamentally, turning theater into a secular temple where the audience can collectively heal their spirits.
Chloé Zhao's Hamnet reveals the psychological as well as spiritual dimension of literature and art. Through reflecting on these connections, we can hopefully begin taking great literature not only as sources of ancient wisdom but by connecting to universal human experiences, as if taking the hand of Agnes, Will, and Hamlet reaching out to us.
Matthew Ordoñez is a university lecturer at De LA Salle University-Manila. He teaches courses in Citizenship and Governance, Development Economics, and Cinema and Politics. He is a member of the Society of Filipino Film Reviewers and writes film reviews for Asian Movie Pulse.
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