Paul Mescal stars as the grieving William Shakespeare in Hamnet, whose struggle with writing Shakespeare ultimately turns his sense of loss into the inspiration for Hamlet.
But early on in the film, cinematographer Łukasz Jaru and director Chloé Zhao wanted to use framing and location to emphasize how different Will and his wife Agnes (Jesse Buckley) were.
When first introduced, Agnes lives as a free spirit and her composition feels open. Meanwhile, Will was “on my mind,” Jal says. “He’s confined to his parents’ house, and he always teaches in this place. The windows are small, he’s always inside the house, he’s always inside the building.”
Its framing reflected suffocation.
Jual wanted to capture the magic of Agnes and Will falling in love. “What you’re feeling, how you look in someone’s eyes. You’re also very present and the world looks beautiful,” he explains. “When we are together, we become closer and follow our emotions.”
But the death of his son Hamnet changes everything. The sky becomes heavier and there is less light in the scene. The colorful energy disappears. “They are isolated in the frame and no longer connected,” he says. “The camera is stationary, slow, and uncomfortably slow.”
Costume designer Malgosia Trzanska also reflected Will’s journey through her designs.
Inspired by sportswear, Trzanska padded Will’s clothes — almost as a form of protection — when he was home with his emotionally abusive father.
She also added slashes to his sleeves. The slashes start small and gradually become larger and longer.
A small piece of his necklace, a toothpick, symbolized his father “poking” him. After Hamnet’s death, Will travels to London, where he completes “Hamlet”. When the performance begins at the Globe Theatre, Will plays a ghost. For this reason, Trzanska studied ghost costumes and discovered how linen was historically used to bury the dead. As a result, she wrapped Will in linen and covered him with clay. The cracked clay represents how broken a man he is. Finally he washes it away and he is free.
Regarding the score, composer Max Richter says that when Will washes away the clay, “he just laid it out.”
It shatters into pieces. This is almost a darkened version of this chorus, this cloud of voices that we naturally associate with Agnes from the beginning. But it’s like a cloud on a moonless night. That’s why it’s so dark. ”
Of playing Will and going on this journey, Mescal says, “I didn’t think about it as a journey from love to sadness. I think I saw it as an analysis of someone’s life.”
He added, “I was excited about the fact that we were able to show a lot of color in that regard. The more we could make the audience feel that these two are madly in love with each other, the more you feel that their connection is lost a little bit in the middle and final act. So, for me, it was exciting because I got to see what it felt like for the audience to dive in at the end while covered in clay. Visually, you see the cracks in his face.”
In that scene, Mescal says he felt the pressure to “land the plane” from the character’s perspective. “We learned how close Agnes’ grief is to the children, because she’s at home with them for much of the movie. And that’s really an opportunity for Will with the audience, to put them in the audience and understand the cost of Hamnet’s loss and the impact it had on him.”
