The New Yorker:

The director of “Hamnet” says that her art has been shaped by her early love of manga, her relationship to the natural world, and her neurodivergence.

By Michael Schulman

Chloé Zhao’s astonishing career has been a series of hairpin turns. Born in Beijing, in 1982, she wound up at New York University’s film school, where she studied under Spike Lee. Starting in 2015, she directed three small-scale, slow-burn features set in the American heartland: “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” “The Rider,” and “Nomadland.” All three capture the expansive beauty of the West—in particular South Dakota, with its moonlike badlands and wide, grassy plains—while using local nonprofessional actors to achieve documentary-like naturalism. “Nomadland,” about a rootless gig worker living in her van, mixed in two established stars, Frances McDormand and David Strathairn, and in 2021 won the Oscar for Best Picture. Zhao also won Best Director, becoming the first woman of color to win the category. How did this young Chinese filmmaker so effortlessly encapsulate middle America’s underclass? Before you could answer that question, Zhao was making a Marvel movie—“Eternals”—with the likes of Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek playing immortal beings shooting lasers out of their eyes.

“Eternals” was an unloved entry in the M.C.U. canon, but it retained some of the spiritual, searching quality that infused Zhao’s indie neo-Westerns. Now another twist: her newest film, “Hamnet,” is a period drama set in Elizabethan England. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel, it imagines the answer to a devastating mystery: What, if anything, did the death of William Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, at age eleven, have to do with his writing of “Hamlet,” just a few years later? (The spellings of the two names were interchangeable, and yet a number of plays, including the frolicsome “Much Ado About Nothing,” came in between.) Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), however, is a secondary character; the film belongs to his wife, Agnes Shakespeare (also known as Anne Hathaway), played by Jessie Buckley, in a performance that is already considered a front-runner in the Best Actress race. Meanwhile, Zhao has just shot the pilot for a revival of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

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