Hamnet (2025) [Film Review] — A Quiet, Rending Meditation on Loss and Creation

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet is an intimate, thoughtfully rendered film that attempts the near-impossible: turning Maggie O’Farrell’s lush, interior novel about the Shakespeare family into a cinematic experience that feels both tactile and transcendent. Zhao strips away spectacle and concentrates on the slow, aching arithmetic of grief, trusting performance and atmosphere to carry the film to its moving conclusion.

A family portrait that becomes a poem of absence

At its center is the marriage of William and Agnes — imagined here with tenderness and small combustions — and the brief, luminous life of their son Hamnet. Zhao and O’Farrell’s screenplay knits together courtship, domestic routine, and the quiet domestic rituals that give the family its shape, before devastatingly fracturing that world. The film spends generous time with everyday gestures — a bread crust shared, a child’s fevered sleep — so that when loss descends, it lands with a real, physical weight.

Two acting lives converging — Buckley’s heart, Mescal’s breath

Jessie Buckley delivers a performance of rare intensity as Agnes. She invests the role with an inward force: small moments of tactile caregiving, sudden flashes of fury, and long private gazes that reveal a woman both otherworldly and animal-true. Paul Mescal plays William with a softer, more reflective grief; his quieter palette complements Buckley’s emotional extroversion and allows the film to explore different registers of mourning. The child actor who embodies Hamnet—briefly on screen—gives the role the vitality it needs, and the supporting cast (including Joe Alwyn, Zac Wishart, James Lintern, and Justine Mitchell) orbit the leads with careful restraint.

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Cinematic minimalism that amplifies feeling

Zhao’s familiar eye for landscape and small-object detail serves the material well. The film favors natural light, long takes, and a modest, almost domestic production design that keeps the world grounded. The cinematography patiently records texture — mud, hearth smoke, the curve of a mother’s hand — and Zhao allows silence to be a character. The result is a film that feels like a stage for interior life rather than a historical pageant.

Music and momentum—how the finale makes the film sing

A deliberate tempo governs Hamnet: long on accumulation, shorter on explanation. The score is used sparingly but with surgical effect, guiding emotion without forcing it. Zhao builds toward a final sequence whose emotional clarity reframes everything that precedes it — a moment where private sorrow intersects with an act of creation, and the film’s meditation on how art can transmute loss becomes unmistakably, heartbreakingly clear.

Where the film hesitates

Hamnet is not without its limits. Its reverence for atmosphere sometimes leans into ponderousness, and some viewers may find the pacing too measured—long stretches privilege mood over plot. A few moments risk feeling too symbolic or staged, pushing at the line between poetic and precious. And by focusing so tightly on grief as a crucible for genius, the film occasionally flirts with teleology: implying that artistic immortality is the consolation prize for suffering.

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Final assessment — a modest, powerful achievement

Hamnet is not a crowd-pleaser in the broad sense, but it is a richly felt piece of filmmaking that rewards patience. Zhao’s direction, coupled with two commanding lead performances from Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, turns a literary meditation into a cinematic one — quiet, intimate, and finally cathartic. The film may not answer every historical question it raises, nor should it; instead, it offers a humane reflection on how slender domestic moments swell into the larger currents of memory and art. For viewers willing to sit with the sorrow, Hamnet delivers a genuinely moving payoff.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5)