It’s obvious from the start that Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel (both collaborated on the screenplay) is not meant to be taken as a fact-based document about William Shakespeare’s married life. Though I haven’t studied Shakespeare as a historical figure, the whole tone of the movie is more cinematic than literary, not so much in visual terms but rather verbally and culturally. For the first third, during which pre-Globe Will (Paul Mescal) courts the hippie-like Agnes (Jessie Buckley) much to the consternation of both their guardians, the atmosphere has a rom-com vibe that’s not just anachronistic but also forced. Even when the dialogue gets purplishly elevated and Will recites the story of Orpheus to Agnes as a means of seduction it comes off as a meet-cute moment designed to advance a familiar romantic agenda that the film definitely wants you to believe in. 

The most appealing thing about the couple’s love is the aspect that always plays out in romance movies, namely the difference in station that challenges this love. Will is the educated son of a tanner who doesn’t see much value in his son’s education, since he believes it’s turned him into a moony dreamer who sits around writing poems when he should be working on his trade. His side gigs as a tutor to wannabe bourgeois children in his village places him only a step or two above a mere kitchen maid, and so he sees nothing wrong in wooing Agnes, the illegitimate daughter of a dead woman who practiced a kind of New Age mysticism that relied heavily on a deep connection to nature. But to her aunt, who has raised her, as well as the rest of her household, Agnes is practically a witch. It’s an interesting contrast that might have been even more interesting if the differences had been maintained rather than flattened out after Will and Agnes marry and have children. The tragedy of the couple’s young son, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), dying of illness is compounded by Will’s always being away in London pursuing his dramatic craft, an occupation that Zhao and O’Farrell hardly address at all until the very end, where his genius is revealed as not only insightful but superhumanly empathetic. It’s not a spoiler to say that he translates his grief into Hamlet, but it’s difficult to believe it could have happened that way without some indication of how Will himself brought the play into being. As it stands, almost all the suffering we see is on Agnes’s part, and while Buckley gives it her all—it’s why she won the Oscar—it adds up to, as one critic so aptly put it, “grief porn.” 

It might have worked better for me if the protagonist wasn’t actually William Shakespeare, because the historical allusions just get in the way of the melodrama, which isn’t up to Shakespeare’s level; but, then, what is?

Opens April 10 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5069), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

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photo (c) 2025 Focus Features LLC/Agata Grzybowska