PREMISE (WHAT IS IT ABOUT)
Hamnet adapts Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel and brings the focus to Shakespeare’s home life through the story of his wife, Agnes Hathaway. The film follows her early connection with younger William Shakespeare, the challenges they face as a couple under social judgment, and the reality of Agnes raising their children while he pursues his career in London. Everything changes with the loss of their son Hamnet, a moment that reshapes their family and leads to the creation of the play Hamlet.
CONTEXT (WHERE IT COMES FROM)
Nomadland, which won Zhao the 2021 Oscar, felt like the culmination of her voice so far, a fantastic and gentle portrait of a small community built from non-actors, real locations, and long, quiet moments that showed exactly what she does best. Rather than simply turning that style toward other overlooked corners of America, her next step has been to push the voice itself, seeing what happens when it is laid over different genres. The first experiment, Eternals, tried to place her quiet, contemplative gaze inside a Marvel film full of cosmic plot and digital battles, and the clash left almost no one satisfied. With Hamnet, she reaches for a more promising mix, using Maggie O’Farrell’s much-praised novel to blend her naturalistic touch with bigger, more direct surges of emotion. The early signs, from praise at Telluride to the Toronto People’s Choice Award and repeated reports of screenings filled with audible sobbing, suggest that this time the experiment has paid off.
EXECUTION (HOW IT WORKS ON SCREEN)
Hamnet is an openly emotional film, and Zhao does not pretend otherwise. She builds long stretches of ordinary routine with Agnes cooking, tending to herbs, and caring for the children, then lets those same spaces crack open into near operatic grief. Some viewers will find this “too much,” especially in the last act, but the emotion does not come out of nowhere. Long before the tragedy, we see Agnes slowly worn down by exhaustion, judgment, and sacrifice, losing parts of herself one small moment at a time. The film is not interested in shocking us with a sudden loss. It leads us step by step into the feeling that something terrible is coming and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. That sense of inevitability is the point.
Zhao’s filmmaking is confident and uses all the technical aspects to guide this build up. Working with cinematographer Łukasz Żal, of Ida and Cold War, she leans on natural light that is often grey, letting dim interiors and overcast skies slowly press in on the characters. The production design and costumes follow the same instinct: nothing looks museum-polished, and those minor scuffs and frays give the world a lived-in aspect. Like in her previous films, she herself takes care of the editing and once again finds an outstanding balance between letting scenes breathe and keeping the momentum going. That holds until the final sequence, when image, sound, and performance start to move together in a more theatrical, overwhelming way.
Max Richter’s score plays a big part in that shift, moving from the quiet orchestral and electronic textures that accompany most of the film to a full-on statement of “On the Nature of Daylight.” The piece, already used in Arrival, Shutter Island, and The Last of Us, could easily feel like a shortcut. Because Zhao lets the whole film build toward that moment, though, its overwhelming harmony feels less like an easy button and more like an earned destination.
At the center of all this is Jessie Buckley, delivering a performance for the ages. She has already proven her range across surrealist cinema, television, and West End musicals, and earned an Oscar nomination for her great work in The Lost Daughter. In Hamnet, she gives her best work yet, shifting from spirited to grounded to shattered with complete control. She has the lived-in authenticity of Frances McDormand in Nomadland, but when the film demands it, she erupts with the raw force of Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice.
While Buckley is the clear standout, the rest of the cast is equally fantastic. Paul Mescal is excellent in the larger dramatic beats, though his quieter moments reveal a hint of strain that has become a pattern in his recent work. The Jupe brothers are especially affecting: Jacobi gives one of the best child performances in years, fully authentic and lived-in, avoiding the trap of token innocence even when the script edges toward it, while Noah delivers a late stand-out moment that bridges private grief with collective experience. Joe Alwyn and Emily Watson may not draw as much attention, but their support of Agnes is exactly what the story requires, and they embody it with restraint and care.
IMPACT (HOW DID IT MAKE ME FEEL)
Shakespeare does not naturally call to me. I know little about his life, I grew up in the city, and the rural world of the 1500s feels very far from my reality. I am also not a parent, and the deepest losses in my life have either come with time to prepare or hit me when I was too young to fully grasp them. Yet watching Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, I felt those distances disappear. The emotional landscape of a woman who risked her reputation to marry a younger man beneath her station, became an easy target for gossip, raised three children largely on her own, encouraged her husband to chase a career that would take him away, and lived in a world that refused to see her gifts, became suddenly clear. When that world is then shattered by loss, her sorrow reached me directly. What moved me most may never have happened in quite this way, but cinema made it feel true, and for those two hours, I carried it as if it were part of my own story.
The film’s central turning point and its final passage will stay with me for a very long time. Both invite us into the silence that follows a tragedy, then slowly show how that silence can become language. Zhao closes the gap between mourner and observer, past and present, until I felt less like I was watching grief and more like I was sharing it. I left the cinema feeling different: more willing to face what will come for me and for the people I love, and more aware of how much we depend on art to help us hold those feelings. In the film’s view, Shakespeare shapes his pain into Hamlet, and Zhao shapes it again into images and sound. Together they suggest that a society is not built only on laws or money but on shared emotions, and that remembering this should quietly change how we treat each other once the lights come up.
Still courtesy of TIFF.