Film Review: Hamnet 哈姆尼特 (2025) - UK / USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 10/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
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Hamnet is a cinematic resurrection. A masterpiece. There are films that entertain, films that instruct, and then there are those rare, luminous creations that seem to operate on a different plane of existence altogether. They become a form of communion. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet is such a film. It is not merely a period drama about the family of William Shakespeare; it is a profound and aching exploration of the alchemy of grief—how the unendurable weight of loss can, through some mysterious human process, be transmuted into art that endures for centuries. This is a towering achievement, a perfect film, and it moved me more deeply than any I have seen this year.
The genius of the film, adapted by Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell from O’Farrell’s novel, is its pivot. The great Bard, played with restless, broiling intensity by Paul Mescal, is not the center. He is the orbit. The sun around which this world truly turns is Agnes (Anne) Shakespeare, brought to life by Jessie Buckley in what must be considered the performance of her career. Buckley does not simply act a role; she seems to embody an elemental force. Her Agnes is rooted in the earth, intuitive to the point of clairvoyance, and wears her love and her pain without a filter. When tragedy strikes—the loss of their only son, Hamnet—we witness two devastatingly different responses. Agnes’s grief is a silent, sprawling country, a hollowing-out of the home. William’s is a frantic retreat into the quill and the page, a desperate attempt to chase his boy’s ghost through the labyrinth of language.
This creative tension is the film’s heartbeat. Zhao and the legendary cinematographer Łukasz Żal (Ida, Cold War) frame their world in a lush, earthy palette. The early scenes in the forest have an enchanted, dappled-light quality, a reflection of Agnes’s untamed spirit. This gradually gives way to the gritty, mud-spattered realism of Stratford and the raw, wooden embrace of the Globe Theatre in London. Every composition is a painting, but a living one, where the very light seems heavy with unspoken emotion. It is visual poetry of the highest order.
Max Richter’s score, weaving in his iconic “On the Nature of Daylight,” does not manipulate but rather underscores the profound melancholy and fleeting moments of grace. The supporting cast—Emily Watson’s prickly Mary Shakespeare, Joe Alwyn’s sturdy Bartholomew—are flawless, but special mention must go to young Jacobi Jupe, whose Hamnet is a creature of such vivid, joyful light that his absence becomes a tangible, haunting presence.
And then there is the third act. I will not spoil its quiet power, only to say that it builds to a crescendo of understanding that is nothing short of a tour de force. Agnes, drawn to London, witnesses a performance of a new play by her husband: The Tragedie of Hamlet. As the words wash over her—“Remember me”—the realization dawns. This is not just a play. It is a seance. A monument. A father’s impossible, glorious attempt to etch his son’s name into the breath of eternity. The catharsis here is emotionally devastating and yet, paradoxically, uplifting. It is a testament to the idea that our deepest wounds can become the wellspring for what makes us immortal.
Hamnet is unapologetically raw and demands a patient spirit. It is a film of quiet glances, of stifled sobs, of the deafening silence that follows catastrophe. It trusts its audience to sit within that stillness. In return, it offers a revelation that is genuinely beautiful. This is not a film about how Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. It is a film about why he had to. It is about the cost, and it is about the redemption. In that alchemy, it finds its perfect, heartbreaking truth. (Neo, 2026)
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