HAMNET (2025)

Genre: Drama
Director: Chloe Zhao
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Zac Wishart, Joe Alwyn, Justine Mitchell, Emily Watson, David Wilmot
Runtime: 2 hr 6 min
Rating: M18 (Sexual Scenes)
Released By: UIP
Official Website:

Opening Day: 22 January 2026

Synopsis: From Academy Award® winning writer/director Chloé Zhao, Hamnet tells the powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet. After losing their son Hamnet to plague, Agnes and William Shakespeare grapple with grief in 16th-century England. A healer, Agnes must find strength to care for her surviving children while processing her devastating loss.

Movie Review:

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet reaches quietly, devastatingly into the innermost chambers of grief, touching those who have known loss with an ache that feels almost too intimate to bear. Yet, in true Zhao fashion, the film does not leave its audience stranded in sorrow. Instead, it guides them—gently, patiently—towards the fragile but unmistakable possibility that life, even after unimaginable heartbreak, can still hold beauty, meaning, and renewal.

Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel, Hamnet reimagines the life of William Shakespeare through the lens of personal tragedy. The story centres on Shakespeare, his wife Agnes, and their children, particularly their twins Hamnet and Judith. When illness strikes the family, the narrative unfolds not as historical biography but as an intimate meditation on love, mortality, and the ways grief reshapes those left behind. Zhao resists melodrama, choosing instead to let emotion surface through silence, gesture, and the passage of time.

Jessie Buckley is extraordinary as Agnes, embodying a woman ahead of her time—intuitive, fiercely independent, and deeply connected to the natural world. Buckley conveys Agnes’s devotion to her husband and children with a raw, physical immediacy, while also capturing her longing for autonomy within the confines of her era. Her performance pulses with life, making Agnes both grounded and ethereal, and anchors the film’s emotional weight.

Paul Mescal, as Shakespeare, is quietly mesmerising. He portrays the playwright not as a towering literary figure, but as a man marked by tenderness, guilt, and unspoken sorrow. Mescal’s restraint allows vulnerability to seep through in unexpected moments, making his absence from the Supporting Actor race at the 98th Academy Awards a notable snub.

One of the film’s most inspired choices is the casting of real-life brothers Jacobi and Noah Jupe as Hamnet and the actor playing Hamlet on stage. Noah, in particular, gives Hamnet a gentle curiosity and warmth that makes the loss all the more piercing, while Jacobi commands presence with his limited screen time.

Visually, Hamnet is immersive and transportive. The production design meticulously recreates the textures of the period, drawing viewers into a world shaped by earth, wood, and candlelight. Zhao’s frequent returns to nature—rolling fields, forests, rivers—offer moments of visual breathing space, grounding the film in cycles of life that endure beyond human suffering. These scenes feel restorative, reinforcing the film’s belief in continuity and renewal.

Max Richter’s score is both beautiful and devastating, weaving through the film like an emotional undercurrent. The decision to use his 2004 composition “On the Nature of Daylight” during a climactic moment is inspired—its aching simplicity elevates the scene into something transcendent, etching itself into memory with quiet force.

Nominated for eight Academy Awards, Hamnet stands as one of Zhao’s most emotionally resonant works. It is a film that hurts deeply, yet offers solace in equal measure—a reminder that grief and joy are not opposites, but companions. Through delicate storytelling and profound empathy, Zhao crafts a cinematic experience that breaks the heart, then carefully, tenderly, helps it heal. Hamnet is not the kind of film that ends when the credits roll; it lingers quietly in the mind, returning in fragments of images, music, and emotion long after it has faded from the screen. 

Movie Rating:

(A film of aching beauty, Hamnet breaks the heart with grief and gently stitches it back together with hope)

Review by John Li