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Hamnet poster

Hamnet

“Keep your heart open.”

7.8
2025
2h 6m
DramaRomanceHistory
Director: Chloé Zhao

Overview

The powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare's timeless masterpiece, Hamlet.

Trailer

Official Trailer Official

Cast

Reviews

AI-generated review
The Grammar of Grief

In the cinema of Chloé Zhao, the landscape is never merely a backdrop; it is a sentient participant, a vast, indifferent witness to human fragility. From the windswept badlands of *The Rider* to the transient American West of *Nomadland*, Zhao has always been drawn to characters who are untethered, living in the margins where civilization frays into the wild. With *Hamnet*, her adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s celebrated novel, she applies this same earthy, tactile lens to the sixteenth century. The result is a period piece that feels less like a historical reenactment and more like a fever dream of mud, feathers, and silence. It is not a film about the "Bard of Avon"; it is a film about the cost of being human when the world is cruel enough to take your child.

Zhao’s visual language here is a rejection of the polished, sterile aesthetic often associated with Tudor dramas. There are no stiff ruffs or pristine corridors. Instead, cinematographer Łukasz Żal captures a world of "filthy fingernails" realism, where the camera lingers on the textures of beeswax, damp wool, and the rough bark of trees. The film’s opening hour, detailing the courtship of the young Latin tutor (Paul Mescal) and the forest-dwelling herbalist Agnes (Jessie Buckley), is steeped in a Malickian reverence for the natural world. Their love is not conveyed through Shakespearean soliloquies—which Mescal’s character has not yet written—but through a shared, quiet understanding of the earth. They are creatures of their environment, and Zhao films them as such, framing their bodies against the sun and the soil, grounding the myth of "Shakespeare" in the sweaty, desperate reality of a struggling young couple.

But the film’s true weight settles in its second half, with the arrival of the bubonic plague. Here, the narrative pivots from romance to a suffocating study of loss. The death of eleven-year-old Hamnet (played with heartbreaking fragility by Jacobi Jupe) is the singularity into which the family collapses. Zhao avoids the melodramatic; instead, she focuses on the domestic geography of sorrow. The scene where Agnes discovers her son’s body is a masterclass in restraint and release. Buckley, whose performance is a raw nerve exposed to the elements, delivers a silent, guttural wail that seems to rip through the screen. It is a moment of pure, unadulterated devastation that anchors the film, reminding us that before *Hamlet* was a play, Hamnet was a boy.

The brilliance of *Hamnet* lies in how it navigates the chasm between private grief and public art. The "Ghost" that haunts the film is not the one on the battlements of Elsinore, but the absence at the dinner table. When the film finally travels to London for the staging of the play, Zhao resists the urge to make it a triumph. The premiere of *Hamlet* is not depicted as a glorious arrival, but as a painful exorcism. As Agnes watches her husband on stage, playing the Ghost of the father to an actor (Noah Jupe) who bears her dead son’s name, the film achieves a profound synthesis. We see the alchemy of grief: how a father’s inability to save his son is transmuted into a prince’s inability to save his father.

Ultimately, *Hamnet* is a testament to the idea that art is not a cure for pain, but a vessel for it. Zhao has stripped away the icon to reveal the man, and more importantly, the woman beside him, whose own wild magic was the soil from which his genius grew. It is a film that demands we sit with the silence that follows the applause, in the spaces where the people we love used to be.

Clips (6)

"Bye" Official Clip

"Glove" Official Clip

"We Three Meet Again" Official Clip

"What Do You Wish To Do" Official Clip

"When We Kiss" Official Clip

"I Have To Go" Official Clip

Featurettes (23)

Why author and screenplay co-writer Maggie O'Farrell wrote HAMNET.

"That's what I love about movies." Bradley Cooper on Jessie Buckley's performance in Hamnet.

A Conversation with Composer Max Richter, Moderated by Finneas O’Connell

Chloé Zhao on the quiet magic of intuitive storytelling.

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre welcomes the HAMNET cast home.

Chloé Zhao Reveals How She & Jessie Buckley Found Hamnet's Ending Four Days Before Wrap | BAFTA

Co-screenplay writer Maggie O’Farrell on bringing Agnes to life in HAMNET.

Paul Mescal reflects on HAMNET at the Irish premiere.

Creating is healing.

Nature in HAMNET - Official Featurette

Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal make the perfect pairing in HAMNET.

Learning how everyone feels the love.

Exit strategy: Irish.

Shakespeare, but make it Paul Mescal.

Share the experience of HAMNET on the big screen

There's no place like home.

Paul Mescal on why Shakespeare’s story still hits home today.

Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal share memories from the set of HAMNET.

Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley read HAMNET by Maggie O'Farrell.

To snack, or not to snack, that is the question?

“Grief Is What Connects Us” – Inside the Making of ‘Hamnet’

Paul Mescal on embodying William Shakespeare for Hamnet

Q&A | TIFF 2025

Behind the Scenes (5)

"All The World Is A Stage" Official Featurette

Jessie & Paul take us behind the scenes of HAMNET.

How Costume Design Breathes Heart Into the World of Hamnet | Dressed | Ep 12

Building Hamnet: Designing Chloé Zhao’s Cinematic World - Reel Destinations

Featurette

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