‘Hamnet’: Stellar cast propels tragic Shakespearean drama

“Tell me a story,” the earthy young woman asks the shy Latin tutor early in Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet.” What story, he asks? “Something that moves you.”

She’s made a shrewd choice of storyteller. This awkward young man seems to have a way with words as he recounts the tragic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. As well he should: One day he’ll be known as the finest wordsmith in the world.

But Agnes, though being wooed by William Shakespeare himself, doesn’t have the same relationship with words, nor need for them. Unlike her bookish suitor, her mystical nature and appetite for life lend her ready access to a seemingly volcanic array of emotions, from giddy joy to unfathomable grief.

And volcanic is the best way to describe Jessie Buckley’s startling performance in “Hamnet,” Zhao’s unabashedly emotional adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel. Also starring a magnetic Paul Mescal as Will, it’s a story that imagines the early life of the young couple from Stratford. And as O’Farrell’s readers know, it centers on a life-altering loss: the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet.

Zhao, co-writing with O’Farrell, goes straight for the tear ducts, with crucial help from a superb cast.

We begin with a heady love story, soon to be tested. “Love doesn’t die; it transforms,” Zhao has said. Her first task is to show how even the sturdiest love can be transformed by grief.

But of course, there’s another act. In “Hamnet,” love is transformed by grief and then transformed again, by art. Which art, you ask? Well, that’s obvious from the title. The play’s the thing.

A crucial fact is laid out at the very start: In 16th-century England, the names “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were interchangeable.

Scholars also know that Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway (also called Agnes), indeed had a son named Hamnet who died at 11. Little else is known, including how he died or what — if any — connection there was to the creation, a few years later, of what many call the greatest play in the English language. A play, it bears noting, about untimely death and grief.

O’Farrell, of course, imagines a deep connection. The movie stays largely faithful to her book.

It starts with a vision of Agnes, curled in a tree hollow as if born there. No wonder Will is enchanted as he looks out his classroom window and spies this free spirit, whose chief companion is a hawk. Their connection is electric.

Agnes will birth their first child, a daughter, alone in nature, clinging to tree branches. A few years later, when she gives birth again, Will’s stern mother (Emily Watson) insists she stay inside. She delivers twins — a boy, then a girl who at first seems stillborn, but is revived by mother’s touch.

Still, Agnes is terrified, because she’s had a vision of two children — not three — at her deathbed. Meanwhile, Will is spending much time in London, pursuing business opportunities and, then, his theater ambitions. Agnes herself encouraged the move. But that changes when Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), who promised his father he’d look after everyone, takes ill.

When he succumbs, Agnes falls into inconsolable grief. But soon Will must leave again. He’s working on a play. We see early rehearsals of “The Tragedie of Hamlet,” and at one point Mescal — frustrated with his players — shows his Shakespearean chops with an angry rendition of the “Get thee to a nunnery!” speech.

The mastery of these words, and their delivery, contrasts starkly with Agnes’ most impactful scenes, which often occur with few or no words at all. To watch Buckley is to appreciate that, even in a story about Shakespeare, it can be the gaps between words that resonate profoundly.