Written by Jana Christin Lammerding
Few conventions in filmmaking spark as much debate as adapting books for the big (or small) screen. With their potential to breathe new life into a story and their risk to dilute the original work, book-to-film adaptations are indeed a potentially rewarding but delicate undertaking in the creative business. Yet a glance at UK’s latest hits, ranging from the 2025 sequel to the Bridget Jones series to Netflix’s newly released adaptation of Emily Henry’s 2021 bestseller People We Meet on Vacation, makes clear they are as popular as ever.
The secret to adapting a book successfully (meaning in a style that feels original or even ‘authentic‘ to the audience) seems to be a rather simple principle: to produce a movie that does not replicate the literary material it draws from, but exists as an artistic piece in its own right. Because movies and books are, after all, different kinds of media, each with their own tools for storytelling and evoking emotion, the art (in the sense of converging craft and creative expression) of adaptation is the art not of recycling but exploring a book— its story, characters, places, and ideas — in a way that both honors and transcends it. The most crucial challenge for filmmakers adapting a narrative from a book is therefore not to successfully force it into an audiovisual form, but to consider what new or hidden aspects of it can be discovered through the lens(es) of cinematography and to emphasize these aspects so that the film aims to enrich the book, not to simply visualize or even replace it.
Perhaps this is why, at last Friday’s private screening of Hamnet (2026) at Oxford’s Ultimate Picture Palace, producer Dame Pippa Harris described her latest award-wining historical drama as more of a sibling than an identical twin to the Maggie O’Farrell novel it adapts.
Hamnet — the movie — recounts the (fictionalized) story of the Shakespeare family, centred around the life and death of young Hamnet, brother to Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and son to William (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Shakespeare (Jessie Buckley). Having won two awards at this year’s Golden Globes and currently regarded a top pick for the 98th Academy Awards, the two-hour film, as Dame Pippa Harris put it, is a testament to the power of love and the power of grief. It is also, however, a testament to intertextuality and the very act (and art) of adaptation.
Hamnet is a film adapting a novel about (among other things) a writer who adapts his own experience and grief into a play; or, in other words, a story on the screen inspired by a story on the page inspired by a story on stage that is inspired by its writer’s life story. What can be thought of as the intertextuality of Hamlet, or the art of adaptation the film exemplifies, is the way in which different forms of media transform their inspiration into stories that stand independently but are woven together at the same time. The stories of Hamnet (and Hamlet) do not replace but rather illuminate one other, each of them embracing the visual and textual qualities of their own way of storytelling while simultaneously echoing a shared emotional resonance and imagery.
And that also seems to be exactly what Hamnet’s mother Agnes realizes in the film’s final scene, standing front row as Hamlet premieres at the Globe. The danish prince whose tragic story she watches is not an imitation of the boy who inspired his name and the son Agnes so deeply grieves, but a life, or rather, a memory adapted into art.
Just as Hamlet’s (or Shakespeare’s?) famous words ‘To die, to sleep, perchance to dream‘ capture the delicate boundaries yet simultaneities between the life, death, and memory of Hamnet, Hamnet reflects on the traces that translation and adaptation leave behind in the act of dreaming a story (and a book) anew.
HAMNET (12A) | Directed by Chloé Zhao | UK | 2025 | 2h 6m | Starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, and Justine Mitchell