a portrait of grief in bloom

There are few names more mythologized than William Shakespeare — the playwright whose words still form the spine of English literature. But what happens when the myth becomes human again? What happens when we step behind the stage, into the quiet domestic world that forged his greatest tragedy?

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet (2025) does precisely this. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel, it reimagines the private life of Shakespeare and his wife Agnes through the death of their only son, Hamnet, whose passing is believed to have inspired Hamlet.

The film is set for a limited theatrical release on November 27, 2025, expanding across North America on December 12, with a UK release scheduled for January 2026. It stars Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare — a pairing that has already ignited critical anticipation across the festival circuit.

from page to film

When Hamnet was published in 2020, readers were struck by its intimacy and lyrical restraint. O’Farrell re-centered a story we thought we knew: she wrote not about the Bard himself, but about the woman who shaped his emotional world. Agnes — known historically as Anne Hathaway — is imagined as intuitive, spiritual, and deeply attuned to nature.

O’Farrell’s prose captures the textures of Tudor England — herbs drying in kitchen rafters, ink bleeding into parchment, the stillness of air before tragedy. Translating such sensory literature to film required a director who could move between landscape and emotion seamlessly. Chloé Zhao, following her Oscar-winning Nomadland and The Rider, was a natural choice.

Zhao’s connection with O’Farrell on the screenplay preserves the book’s meditative rhythm while adapting it for visual language. The result is neither strict biography nor historical pageant, but something more elusive: an elegy rendered in motion.

 

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cast

The casting of Jessie Buckley as Agnes is a masterstroke. Buckley has long been cinema’s emotional lightning rod — fierce, vulnerable, and capable of carrying the ineffable. In Hamnet, she channels a woman whose intuition borders on the supernatural. Agnes feels her children’s fevers before they begin; she speaks to bees; she understands grief as both curse and inheritance.

Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare, by contrast, is quieter — a man who wrestles with ambition and guilt, whose brilliance isolates him as much as it elevates him. Where Buckley burns, Mescal smolders. Their chemistry grounds the film in human ache rather than literary reverence.

Supporting performances include Emily Watson as Mary Arden (Shakespeare’s mother) and Jacobi Jupe as the ill-fated Hamnet, whose presence, though brief, becomes the film’s echoing pulse.

Together, they form a portrait of a family caught between divine creation and earthly loss — a household in which love and death coexist like candlelight and silhouette

setting

Filmed primarily in Wales and London’s Charterhouse district, Hamnet is drenched in earth tones and natural light. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal, known for Cold War and Ida, captures a visual world of porous boundaries: interior and exterior, real and imagined.

The film opens on a pastoral dream — a hand brushing through lavender, sunlight glinting off ink — before drawing us into the claustrophobic stillness of a home awaiting news of sickness. The camera lingers on skin, breath, and space; it watches rather than commands.

Zhao’s direction is both reverent and raw. She trades sweeping Shakespearean grandeur for tactile intimacy: the scrape of wood, the soft flutter of curtains, the sound of Buckley’s sighs filling an empty room.

Composer Max Richter provides a score that glows with restrained melancholy — strings swelling like memory, then dissolving into silence. Every note feels like a heartbeat caught between mourning and transcendence.

the story beneath the legend

At its core, Hamnet is about transformation — the metamorphosis of private agony into universal art.

The plot follows Agnes and William through the rhythms of marriage, parenthood, and the small wonders of domestic life. When illness strikes their children, the world narrows. Hamnet’s death becomes the hinge on which the entire narrative turns — a moment that fractures time itself.

But Zhao avoids melodrama. The grief here is elemental, slow, and circular. Agnes moves through the days like a ghost among the living, tending to gardens and memories. William, meanwhile, flees toward the theater — to the only place he can make sense of loss.

What emerges is not simply the origin of Hamlet, but an inquiry into what art can do with pain. Can writing resurrect the dead? Can imagination offer mercy when faith fails? Zhao does not answer these questions outright. She lets the silence speak.

behind the lens

Hamnet is the first connection between Amblin Entertainment, Neal Street Productions, and Hera Pictures, uniting creative forces across the Atlantic. Producers Pippa Harris, Sam Mendes, and Steven Spielberg lend both gravitas and resources, while Zhao’s creative control ensures an auteur’s coherence.

The film’s production design evokes the organic tactility of 16th-century England — muted fabrics, candlelit interiors, and air thick with woodsmoke. Costumes, by Jane Petrie, carry narrative weight: Agnes’s green shawl becomes a visual motif of fertility and loss.

Every frame is composed with painterly restraint, as if each shot could hang in a gallery. The editing, done by Zhao herself, allows emotion to unfold in real time rather than cutting away from pain.

festival debut 

Premiering at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, Hamnet won the People’s Choice Award, a distinction historically aligned with future Oscar nominations. Earlier, its quiet premiere at Telluride had critics whispering about its emotional power — the kind of subdued revelation that lingers long after the lights dim.

Publications like Variety, IndieWire, and The Guardian have already called it “one of the year’s most affecting films,” praising Buckley’s “transcendent, fearless performance” and Mescal’s “restrained brilliance.”

The film currently holds a 97% early critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, with reviews lauding Zhao’s “poetic realism” and Richter’s “score of mourning and renewal.”

Oscar speculation is inevitable. Buckley, already a nominee for The Lost Daughter, could see a career-defining recognition, while Zhao may reassert her place among the decade’s most introspective filmmakers.

impression

Hamnet will follow the classic awards-season trajectory:

• November 27, 2025 – Limited theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles

• December 12, 2025 – Nationwide U.S. expansion via Focus Features

• January 9, 2026 – United Kingdom release via Universal Pictures

• February 2026 – Select global markets (including Australia and France)

Such a rollout mirrors that of Nomadland and Phantom Thread — artful films that built momentum through word of mouth and critical reverence rather than spectacle

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