Adaptation is everywhere! In the spring of 2026, MTC is running a new series called Adaptation Anxiety, where new and returning writers consider literary adaptations from the last few years. We ask not whether these adaptations are good or bad, faithful or unfaithful to the source, but bigger questions about the logic underlying contemporary works of adaptation and why audiences have such big feelings about seeing precious characters on screen. Why, in other words, are we so anxious about the move from book to screen, and what does all this angst about the adaptation as a form tell us about our present relationships to these mediums?
I would much rather watch a film that deals with love and loss than watch a film that is a testament to the power of art to deal with love and loss. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet (2025) is the latter kind of movie. There are many reasons for this, but chiefly it’s because of the film’s farcical grasp at a “powerful” ending. Above all, this ending – where an awestruck audience stretches their hands towards the Globe Theatre’s stage – conveys the film’s awkward relation to literary adaptation.
As a symbol, the outstretched hand is time-tested. It signifies the attempt to embrace another who is either on the cusp of death or lost to the other side. Take, for example, Keats’ “This living hand,” or the arm rising from the grave to claim the living in Carrie (1976), or any action film whose showdown occurs on some kind of precipice. In Zhao’s Hamnet, the hand functions in much the same way. In the concluding scene of this historical drama, Agnes Hathaway stands amongst the Globe’s audience as her husband’s (that’s William Shakespeare to you) production of Hamlet finishes one of its first performances. Suddenly, Agnes reaches for and touches the character Hamlet, who, to her, is just like her dead son, Hamnet. The actor playing Hamlet is a bit perturbed by this breach of the fourth wall but carries on. Then, at the play’s very end, the whole audience spontaneously reaches for Hamlet/Hamnet! A sea of zombified spectators raise their hands to the stage as if it were a source of warmth on a churlish winter’s day. It’s enough to make Oscar Wilde howl.
Zhao’s film is an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name. Hands prominently feature in O’Farrell’s text, and they have a special significance for Agnes. She reads palms throughout the novel, and this palmistry is not just a mode of aesthesis but also diagnosis and prophecy. Yet that “deep groove” which Agnes originally detected in Hamnet’s palm when he was a newborn did not signify “a long life” as she had assumed. With Hamnet’s sudden death eleven years later, not only is the mother’s link to her son dissolved, but also the living’s uneasy measure of death’s ways. In the novel, the tragic passing of Hamnet reactivates an earlier image of the hand and its representation of life and death—previously in the book, Agnes had daydreamed the dead as figures who “mill about outside” a generic room, “pressing their palms and faces and fingertips to the window, desperate to get back, to reach their people” (emphasis added). Remarkably, this image of hands, digits, and faces pressing helplessly against the veil looks a lot like the Globe audience in Zhao’s adaptation.
Though hands are prominent throughout O’Farrell’s novel, especially in the closing moments, there’s no indication to suggest that Agnes actually violates the partition between audience and players in the original text, and certainly no mention of a wider audience participation. So why the addition of this hysterical Mexican wave in Zhao’s film? It’s sort of invoking the iconic moment of spontaneous collectivity in Spartacus (1960), and also echoing the Biblical scene where the disciples touch Christ’s wounds after his miraculous resurrection. Essentially, through this moment of impulsive collectivity-cum-religious communion, Hamnet establishes a high estimation of Shakespeare’s work, as stand-in for all art, and its ability to touch us deeply. But the problem is that the crowd’s reaction in Zhao’s film (which is not found in O’Farrell’s novel) is totally unearned. Hamnet is an intensely private drama about a couple. It’s not interested in this congregation of strangers or the notion of group feeling. These strangers do not have access to the esoteric meaning of Hamlet – Shakespeare’s attempt to resurrect and commune with his departed son – which the playwright’s wife, Agnes, sees and feels and which is the foundation of Hamnet’s premise. Consequently, the group’s sudden intervention nearly two hours into the film comes across as implausible and disingenuous. Instead of participating in the dissolution of the boundaries between literature and life, and individual and collective grief, this audience operates more crudely as Hamnet’s gormless stooges. They are theatrical props offering a rather heavy-handed suggestion to the film-viewer as to how to finally feel. More specifically, the film indicates that we should be moved by Hamnet in a similar way to how these strangers move toward Hamlet. I can’t say I budged.
The awkwardness and condescension of this scene, then, speaks to the film’s anxious engagement with capital L Literature. From before the first frame of Hamnet, Shakespeare’s greatness is forewritten. Consequently, one of the tasks (and problems) for Zhao’s Hamnet is to both revisit and convey anew the profundity of a canonized writer’s art. But representing the mighty literary power of Literature on film is a tricky feat. This difficulty is why so many literary biopics, impressed by the tailcoats they ride on, feel both stale and self-congratulatory. Hamnet, though not a biopic, is little different. It deploys cinematic techniques of a sentimental stock – a sparse classical score, flashbacks, lengthy shots of solitary figures, forests, fields, and a bird in flight – to convey a brooding depth that never comes. Unlike O’Farrell’s distinctive blend of normal indirect and free indirect speech, Zhao’s film does not have sufficient tools to reflect Agnes’ interiority. It therefore struggles to represent Agnes’ private reading of her husband’s Hamlet, and resorts, abruptly, to an ensemble cast to hammer home the message. In case grief’s heartache (what Hamnet posits as the source of Hamlet) wasn’t obvious, the closing scene in the Globe over-compensates and over-reaches.
Omid Bagherli is Lecturer in Global Anglophone literature at Royal Holloway, University of London for 2025/2026. His current favourite riff on Hamlet is Enter Ghost (2024).
Series banner illustration by Carolyn Jao
Article photo: courtesy of Focus Features