Hamnet ★★★★★

By The Recs AM - Andrew Melrose 3 weeks ago

Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal mine the deepest emotions of the tragedy that inspired one of the world’s greatest plays.

Stars: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson
Director: Chloe Zhao
Writers: Chloe Zhao, Maggie O’Farrell
Where: Hamnet will be released in cinemas in the US on 27 November 2025, in the UK on 9 January 2026 and in Australia on 15 January 2026
To see or not to see? There is hardly any question. Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet is an elegantly stirring movie about grief and love and the haunting persistence of memory that define great art.
 
After the overblown detour of Eternals, Zhao returns to what she does best: deeply human storytelling with an unmatched intimacy. Adapting Maggie O’Farrell’s highly beloved novel, she brings a calm precision and emotional honesty to a story that imagines the heartbreak that may have inspired one of Shakespeare’s most soaring works, Hamlet. The result is a film that feels both tender and devastating.
Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC

At the centre is Agnes, played beautifully by the redoubtable Jessie Buckley, a herbalist and healer whose bond with the natural world feels almost otherworldly. Opposite her, Paul Mescal gives a quiet, inward performance as Shakespeare, not the towering genius who has imprinted himself upon culture in every corner of the world, but a man torn between his art, his family and his own ambition. Together they create such a poignant drama of love and loss that feels painfully real.

Visually, the film is undoubtedly Zhao. Long takes, sunlight and deliberate pace breathe gravitas into each silence and glance. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal (The Zone of Interest, Cold War) avoids picture-postcard beauty and insists on keeping the lens fixed on the actors and on emotions. Richly visual but never flashy, full of mood and control.

Meanwhile, the score composed by Max Richter that’s so delicately placed within the film, but when it makes its presence felt, it’s gorgeous and elevates the emotional impact while never veering towards sentimentalism. Matched perfectly to Zhao’s tone: emotional, but never overstated. Buckley, an actor who consistantly delivers performances that connect emotionally to audiences, is remarkable here. She is equally adept at strength and vulnerability and brings Agnes an ethereal depth that will stay with you long after the movie finishes. Mescal provides a credible foil to her, all brooding uncertainty and unexpressed emotion. They are supported by an able cast around them, from Emily Watson‘s grim but kind Mary Shakespeare to youngster Jacobi Jupe, whose innocence provides the movie’s emotional ticking time–bomb .

First and foremost, Hamnet is a movie about restraint. Zhao believes in her story and her actors, dodging the trap of melodrama while suggesting something softer and more elegiac. Hamnet’s underlying message is about how art can come redemptively from loss, how love can survive death and about how beauty often transcends from stillness.

Exquisitely written and deeply unsettling, Hamnet persists with us like the final words of a novel or the last lines of a play that you don’t want to end.

Hamnet is the definition of beautifully tragic – ★★★★★ 5 stars

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The Recs AM - Andrew Melrose
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