Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare as an attractive dreamer, but a passionate Jessie Buckley as Agnes is the molten core of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet.Agata Grzybowska/TIFF
The term biographical fallacy is at least a century old, but the temptation to assume a writer’s work is a direct reflection of their life is as powerful as ever. The 2025 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival is stuffed with literary origin stories dramatizing the events that supposedly gave birth to great texts. These overcooked biopics demand a grain of salt.
The worst offender here – although it’s also a more-or-less successful costume drama – is Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, which proposes that William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet as a direct response to his grief over the death of his 11-year-old son. The most challenging consideration of the issue is Agnieszka Holland’s Franz, which weighs the heft of Franz Kafka’s oeuvre in a post-Kafka world.
Based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet is partly a revisionist biography of Shakespeare, depicting his marriage to the older and pregnant Agnes (a.k.a. Anne) Hathaway as a real love match rather than the shotgun wedding often suggested by (male) scholars. Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare as an attractive dreamer, but a passionate Jessie Buckley as Agnes is the molten core of the film.
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The movie is engrossing as long as it is telling the story of Shakespeare’s relationship with the clairvoyant herbalist, an earth mother deeply committed to her three children and increasingly resentful of her husband’s long absences in London. Once Hamnet dies, however, Zhao starts loudly forging thematic connections; after all Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable names in non-standardized Elizabethan spelling. The grief-stricken Shakespeare is shown inventing “To be or not to be” as he holds himself back from self-slaughter, before the audience is treated to several scenes from a not-very-good Elizabethan production of Hamlet that tie it all up with a bow.
In El Cautivo, Julio Peña Fernández plays Miguel de Cervantes, Spain’s Shakespeare.TIFF
Speculative Shakespearean biography is attractive because we know so little of his life. We know even less about the life of Miguel de Cervantes, Spain’s Shakespeare. In El Cautivo, director Alejandro Amenábar takes two small strands – as a young naval officer Cervantes may have been accused of “vile things” and he spent five years as a prisoner of the Moors in Algiers – and from those weaves an exotic and erotic history piece. With Julio Peña Fernández as Cervantes and Alessandro Borghi as the sadistic and seductive Pasha Hasan, lord and ruler of Algiers, the film speculates wildly about a gay relationship that saves the future author of Don Quixote from death.
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Where Zhao serves up the link between art and life on a platter, Amenábar offers amusing visual clues: a tall, thin friar and his roly-poly servant enter on horseback for their annual visits to the ruler’s palace bringing ransom money for the Catholic prisoners. Less subtly, the young Cervantes, who saves the other prisoners from boredom with his tall tales, longs to see the windmills of La Mancha once more.
Cleverly, Amenábar doubles the story here: Cervantes enchants Hasan with the improbable tale of a heterosexual romance between a Muslim woman and a Catholic prisoner as the powerful lord, in his turn, draws the imprisoned Cervantes into his cross-dressing haram. Like Hamnet, this sexy film works best as a romance rather than a biopic, although both suggest that art saves artists’ lives.
In Orwell: 2+2=5, director Raoul Peck delivers a biography of George Orwell, mainly by quoting the man himself from letters.TIFF
We know far more about the 20th-century writers George Orwell and Franz Kafka, both of whom were prodigious letter writers.
In his documentary Orwell: 2+2=5, director Raoul Peck does deliver a biography of Orwell, mainly by quoting the man himself from letters describing how he became revolted by class hierarchies and colonial power during his childhood in India and his service in the British police force in Burma.
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But Peck also wants an audience to recognize how prescient and pertinent Orwell’s writing is, in particular the novels Animal Farm and 1984, and hammers this home with scenes from multiple different film versions of 1984, footage from Ukraine, Gaza and migrant ships, and interview clips from various wise pundits. He’s made the point about Orwell’s relevance by the hour mark, leaving a benumbed audience to sink into depression about the state of both Orwell’s tubercular lungs and our own world.
Idan Weiss as Franz Kafka in Agnieszka Holland’s Franz.URES/TIFF
It’s Holland’s Franz that really acknowledges the issue. The feature combines conventional biopic scenes from the difficult life of the German-speaking Jewish Czech author (played by Idan Weiss); expressionistic scenes that evoke Kafka’s evident alienation from those around him, and interviews where the figures of Kafka’s family, friends and lovers speak directly to the camera, debating interpretations of his biography. To that she increasingly adds humorous contemporary scenes of Kafka tourism in Prague to demonstrate how posthumous fame and literary interpretation weigh down the flimsy, fluttering details of a lived life.
Franz’s father is portrayed as a family patriarch irascible to the point of emotional abuse. In one key scene, where Holland simply assumes that anyone watching a film about Kafka knows the subject of The Metamorphosis, the old man violently slams his hand down on a cockroach that has dared to cross his dining-room table. Kafka is not suddenly smitten by the idea that he is indistinguishable from the cockroach; the moment is satirical, winking at the audience and daring it to fall into the biographical trap.
