In Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” History Breathes, Grief Burns, and Love Soars Higher Than All – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The TIFF Film Review: Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet

By Ross

CANADIAN PREMIERE – United Kingdom | 2025 | 125m | English

“Tell me a story.” “What kind of story would you like?” “One that moves you.”

In Warwickshire, 1582, and deep in the lushness of the woods is where the immense drawing-in happens in Chloé Zhao’s gorgeous and incredibly moving film, “Hamnet.” This is what delivers the blood that courses through this piece, making it feel so alive, connecting the passion and the honesty to the earth and the spirit of the wind and air. The film soars in the skies above all the others that I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival. It aches with a maternal mother-earth heart, pumping that fevered feeling through our veins like the gentle force of nature, both strong and complicated.

This film, which was just awarded TIFF’s 2025 People’s Choice Award, is everything. It takes us into its earthy world with a caring, strongly held grip, pressing on our emotional future with intense pressure. We ask, like William does, ‘what is it your doing?‘  Before falling hopelessly under it, her, and the film’s uncanny, relentlessly beautiful spell. In the dewy green morning, she awakens, curled up in the warmth and safety of the tree, her mother’s tree. This first image of the woman who will soon be the wife of the illustrious William Shakespeare tells us almost everything we need to know about Agnes, played deeply and luminously by Jessie Buckley (West End’s Cabaret; Netflix’s The Lost Daughter). “You were hungry,” she says to her bird, a hawk that comes to her with flapping of the wings and a beckoning whistle, but it soon becomes clear that not only is she speaking to her hawk, she is addressing all of us, and to the man who will become one of the greatest playwrights of all time.

And then we see him, William Shakespeare, peering out into the horizon, dreaming of an internal world that only Agnes can see, although she’s not able to fully understand her vision just yet. Lushly and wholely portrayed by Paul Mescal (BAM’s A Streetcar Named Desire; Searchlight’s “All of Us Strangers“), William has a hard time with words, when he first speaks to Agnes, but in his storytelling, he is able to open up the skies and the horizon in a way that moves Agnes, the mystical daughter of a “wood witch“, and we can feel the opening of their hearts to one another in that first touch and that first, not so holy palmer’s kiss.

Passion and love, of the deepest kind, live, pumping through their bodies and envading our own. They burn for each other, like Orpheus and Eurydice, when she sees landscapes and worlds outside their realms. “I have no talent for waiting,” he tells her, before that sly smile that Buckley serves up most magically, pulls him in, peeling the egg of their union and delivering forth what the good earth will give birth to.

It’s a fantastic and intricate adaptation, written by Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell (based on her novel of the same name), refigured in its timeframe from the book to the screen, that breathes forth a revelation around life, love, loss, and mourning. The hawk flies true and deliberate from Agners’s steady arm, much like the woman herself, and embodied miraculously by Buckley, she soars as beautiful as can be under the direction of Zhao (“Nomadland“) and through the determined eye of cinematographer Lukasz Zal (“The Zone of Interest“). It’s in her grounded, firm grip that the film finds its emotional core, but not only.

Astonishing and detailed, Pascal gives us a William that is as clear and as troubled as we have ever seen. Scared and almost drowning inside his head, he leaves his love and the family that he holds equally dear, and sets off to London to create something, both personal and for his family. “I’m losing him,” Agnes tells her brother, wonderfully portrayed by Joe Alwyn (“The Brutalist“), pleading against her own desires so William may have his. And the rest, as they say, is history, but not completely. In this compelling film, a context connected to family tragedy and grief that can barely be spoken about is at the heart of this story, and how it leads Shakespeare to create one of his most emotionally true and famous works of art, his Hamlet, which, in William Shakespeare’s day, those two names were basically interchangeable.

The mourning of the death of his 11-year-old “brave” son, Hamnet, is the driving force in the last half of “Hamnet“, pulling us through the complicated connection to the unspeakable grief of a father’s, and the pure agony of a mother’s loss. “You did everything you could,” both William and William’s mother, Mary, played to perfection by Emily Watson (“Gosford Park“), tell her, repeated the thing she clearly already knows, but the pain of her only son’s death hangs over her heavy, making her question her inner vision and her ability to understand. And it is in her outstretched hand where we find the heartbreaking hold she has on us. She pulls us as forcibly as she pushes herself, up to the stage in hopes of clarity in the loss, in her husband, and in herself.

In Zhao’s hands, grief burns, love endures, and history breathes. Interestingly, many historical accounts preface reports of Hamnet’s death with statistics about how common child mortality was in the 16th century, as though it barely made an impact. “Hamnet“, both the book, the West End play (which I saw, but wasn’t as deeply moved by), and the play, reject that premise, presenting Shakespeare not as a distant, untouchable genius but as a real man whose literary prowess was irrevocably impacted by his domestic life.

Somewhere deep in this unveiling is an idea of the unwritten truth, slipping in between the lines, and somehow projecting an idea of the sure-footedness of Agnes. Their initial intimate romance signals something emotionally relevant and raw, unraveling decades of possible misogyny within a few, thoroughly engaging scenes. It all feels so fresh and earthy, and as the plot strides confidently forward down that gentle pathway to the woods, giving light into Agnes’s magnificent powers of healing, her eye for prophecy, and into the circumstances of their marriage and family, the film starts to take on an intentional meaningful shape, pulling us in and attaching some griping sadness and warmth to the groundwork laid out before us.

Maggie O’Farrell, the esteemed author of the book that “Hamnet“, the film, is based upon, first imagined that the story she wanted to tell would revolve around a father and his son, much like Shakespeare’s own play, Hamlet, which was dutifully named for his son. It could have been an unpacking of all that is embedded in that type of attachment, and it would have been a fine construction, but something else flew out when she started to dig in. She found herself enthralled, sidetracked by a narrative that didn’t feel right, or honest. Somewhere in that unknown landscape, masked and coated with something akin to misogyny, was a framework that was more compelling in nature. It became clear that what had been written, and not written, said much more about the historians than the history itself. And she wanted to know what was there, underneath it all.

“We’ve only ever been taught one narrative about her,” she explains, when thinking about Shakespeare’s wife, a woman referred to as Anne Hathaway, but, at least in the eyes and will of her father, Richard, her name, as written, was Agnes. This woman, Agnes, not Anne, might actually be something quite different than the terrible, detested wife that many male writers and biographers seem to have favored portraying in their historical unpacking. Frank Harris, wrote in 1911 that “For a dozen reasons I accept his view that she was a shrew of the worst” (“The Women of Shakespeare“) and that “among the very few facts of [Shakespeare’s] life that have been transmitted to us, there is none more clearly proved than the unhappiness of his marriage” (Thomas Moore, “Letters and Journals of Lord Byron“, 1830). Yet, O’Farrell, after digging around, came to the understanding, and belief system that Agnes might be something quite different, and that all those proposed theories, the ones suggesting that Shakespeare had been lured into a hasty marriage by an illiterate “strumpet who had the nerve to get pregnant“, and that ultimately Shakespeare had run away to London, more to escape her than for any other reason, might not be as factually based as stated year after year, in biography after biography. In fact, O’Farrell could find no evidence of this at all, just misogynistic conjecture.

She also noticed that in many of Shakespeare’s plays, the wives, as written, seemed to be highly intelligent and faithful women, within marriages that worked well. Also, when looking at the grieving Ophelia in Hamlet, we see a woman whose grief is so strong that it seems to come out of nowhere and engulf her, almost like a mother’s grief over the death of a child, possibly Agnes and Shakespeare’s own son, Hamnet. “He is dead and gone, lady,” Ophelia cry-sings, “He is dead and gone…” Ophelia, who might be a stand-in for a grieving Agnes, also hands out herbs to different characters within the play as she goes off mad from grief, drawing fascinating parallels to the natural healer that Agnes, as portrayed by Buckley in this film, most likely was. Every single plant Ophelia delivers is a “well-known cure for some flaw that she perceives in them,” and engaging with this, O’Farrell suggests, almost playfully, that she likes to “imagine Shakespeare writing that scene with Ophelia and not really knowing which herbal cures did what. How would he know? Maybe he had to ask Agnes – maybe she contributed to that scene.” A framing that paints a portrait of quite a different kind of wife, mother, and woman than what the historians wanted us to see. And also the impetus for the creation of one of his finest plays.

“Hamnet“, like the book, builds on these hints and whispers, creating a woman like few imagined. One that was illiterate, that is true – “but what daughter of a sheep farmer would have learned to read in those days? What use would it have been to her?” – Yet, maybe she was much more than all that; quite the opposite of this conniving woman a few years senior to Shakespeare, whom he married quick solely by force. Possibly their union was of a different nature, a coming together for other, more passionate and emotional reasons. Who’s to know, really, but here, finally, in this deliberate and determined film by Zhao, we finally get to be introduced to, not only a more humanized heartbroken Shakespeare, dynamically delivered by Pascal, but to a more thoughtful and determined young woman; one who became his wife, and is filled to overflowing with a different kind of knowledge and care. She is a natural healer, and someone who might contain far more cleverness than any young Latin tutor could fathom. 

In the rooted, tangled space between mourning and memory, Zhao discovers a cinema of grace and compassion. There are so many stunningly tender and telling moments in her elegant Oscar-worthy “Hamnet” film that it almost overwhelms. The visual beauty, the undercurrent of emotional truth, and the patience she has with her characters shimmer. Yet, it’s her steadfast engagement with the honest emotional stance of both Agnes, William, and those around them, including Noah Jupe’s captivating portrayal of the actor taking the stage as Shakespeare’s first Hamlet, that ultimately grounds the film in the moist earthen haven. 

“Will you be brave” in the “deep, dark black void“? He is asked. “Hamnet“ is not just another literary adaptation, nor is it merely a portrait of grief. In Zhao’s wise hands, it becomes an emotional reclamation of Agnes as a figure long distorted by history, of Shakespeare as a profoundly caring man bound to family and loss, and of cinema as a place where myth, scholarship, and emotion can entwine like the roots of those century-old trees that beckon to Agnes. Buckley and Mescal breathe life into these roles with an intimacy that feels both poetic and startlingly grounded, staged in Zhao’s lyrical vision of the flesh and ache of lived experience. Out of mourning comes art, and out of art comes a kind of grace. Among the many extraordinary films I was fortunate enough to see at TIFF, “Hamnet” soars above, daring to root Shakespeare’s genius not in the heavens alone, but in the earthen soil of love, loss, and the steadfastness of a woman too long left in the margins.