“The Eagle Flies: Agnes, Shakespeare, and the Burden of Destiny”
Many years ago, wandering through Epcot Center, I drifted into the national pavilions with a vague curiosity and modest expectations. Some countries announce themselves loudly; others rely on clichés. The British pavilion, however, offers something almost disarmingly obvious: Shakespeare. Plays, language, heritage—presented as cultural inevitability. And yet, despite that predictability, the experience lingered. Shakespeare endured not because of spectacle, but because his work still breathed.
That memory returned to me while watching Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s meditation on grief, life, and the conditions that shape creation. This is not Shakespeare as monument, but Shakespeare as consequence—born from a world that is fragile, unsanitary, and permanently exposed to disappearance.
What struck me immediately were certain shots—absolute portraits. Faces held in light, sculpted rather than merely photographed. Zhao lingers on skin, eyes, and stillness; the lighting arrests time, transforming her characters into living paintings. Cinema, here, briefly stops narrating and simply looks.
Zhao’s attention to material life is equally striking. This is a dangerous world, lived close to death. Hygiene is minimal; nails are dark with labor and soil; bodies carry the evidence of illness and fatigue. Plague is not an event but an atmosphere. Medicine is primitive and intimate—based on direct contact with plants, essences, textures, and belief. Healing is tactile, experimental, and precarious. These practices are filmed not as historical curiosities, but as embedded knowledge—ways of surviving rather than understanding.
At the film’s emotional core are its performances. Jessie Buckley’s Agnes is the film’s gravitational force, a presence guided as much by instinct as by reason. Her intelligence is bodily before it is verbal. In a decisive, intimate gesture, she reads the future of her husband by placing her thumb against his hand—an act at once tender and prophetic. Through posture, touch, and stillness, she recognizes his brilliance and understands that his path must lead elsewhere, to London. She knows, in that quiet moment, that the destiny of an eagle is to fly high. It is not spoken as ambition but felt as inevitability. Her grief and her love occupy the same physical space: to hold is also to release. Buckley does not perform sorrow; she inhabits it—carrying it in breath, stance, and silence. Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare is quieter, more recessive, defined by absence rather than assertion. His performance unfolds in restraint, tracing the invisible labor of bearing loss and slowly transmuting it into work, into language, into endurance.
When the film finally enters the theater, it becomes clear that the stage itself is part of the work. The theater is not merely a setting—it is an extension of the drama. The audience sits dangerously close, nearly inside the performance. Breath circulates between actors and spectators; presence becomes reciprocal. The spectators do not simply watch Hamlet—they participate in it. The actors, in turn, respond to this proximity, their bodies attuned to the collective tension, the shared air, the fragile communion of bodies gathered in one space.
The famous “To be, or not to be” is no longer a philosophical abstraction here, nor a rhetorical set piece. In Hamnet, it arrives already wounded by experience. The question is not about existence in the abstract, but about presence: where one is, and where one fails to be. Not to be is not simply death—it is absence. It is being in London when one should have been at home. It is arriving too late. It is the unbearable knowledge of not having been there when a son dies. Zhao reframes the soliloquy as something born from lived catastrophe rather than intellect. It carries the weight of plague, of child death, of nights spent listening for breath that may stop. To be becomes an act of endurance; not to be names the wound of distance, the guilt of survival, the cost of ambition. Spoken in a theater where actors and spectators share the same air, the line ceases to belong to Shakespeare alone. It becomes a collective hesitation—suspended between staying and leaving, between love and the work that pulls one away.
In Hamnet, the past is not reconstructed—it is felt. From this physical, vulnerable world, art does not emerge as escape, but as residue: what remains after life has passed through the body, what lingers in touch, in breath, in light, in absence, and in the spaces between being and not being.
