[Watch our review review above and/or read the review below.]

Hamnet is an emotionally powerful work, a piece of cinema that explores loss and grief unabashedly and beautifully. It is as tender and wondrous as it is devastating. It is a film that sits with sorrow rather than softening it. I found myself floored by individual moments, struck by its quiet beauty and poetic touch, and undone by its unguarded honesty when confronting death and the echoes it leaves behind. At times, the emotional weight does verge on exhaustion, but that feels less like a misstep and more like the point. Grief, after all, is not tidy or considerate of the viewer.

Chloé Zhao (Nomadland, Eternals) approaches the material with a quiet artistic confidence, letting the story unfold through calm, humanistic, and often poetic beats. The narrative itself is deceptively simple, but Zhao, co-writing with Maggie O’Farrell (adapting her own novel), keeps a close hold on her characters and the emotional core being explored. There’s a patience to the filmmaking that feels intentional, a belief that the smallest shifts in behaviour, the pauses between conversations, and the rhythms of daily family life can carry real weight. At the edges, the film drifts into something faintly dreamlike, with gentle, almost spiritual flourishes that feel less like fantasy and more like grief taking shape. These moments never overwhelm the story, but they do leave a subtle, lingering unease.

Although Hamnet is often framed as Agnes’ story, the film resists belonging solely to one perspective. Jessie Buckley’s Agnes is undeniably the emotional centre, her grief raw, physical, and overwhelming in ways that feel painfully authentic. As a mother, her love and devastation are palpable, sometimes almost unbearable to sit with. Yet Paul Mescal’s William is not sidelined. His relationship with art, guilt, and absence is given space to breathe, portrayed as a quieter but no less complicated form of mourning. Where Agnes’ grief is outward and consuming, William’s is internalised, shaped into something he can give form to, something he can create.

Hamnet isn’t concerned with interrogating Shakespeare the historical figure. It isn’t aimed at Shakespeare aficionados searching for biographical detail or literary annotation. Instead, Shakespeare becomes a narrative vessel, his life and work serving the emotional truth at the story’s centre rather than dominating it. The film’s final movements draw Agnes and William’s emotional currents together in a closing sequence that is quietly shattering, an assured and heartbreaking close that honours them both.

Buckley delivers a tour de force performance. In moments of wonder and tenderness, she radiates warmth; in scenes of anguish, her sorrow cuts through the screen with an almost physical intensity. While the repetition of grief may test some viewers, there’s simply no denying the honesty and commitment behind her powerful performance. Mescal, meanwhile, offers a restrained and deeply human take on William, grounding him not as a distant literary icon but as a flawed man driven by an artistic need. That need is expressive, compulsive, and, at times, quietly selfish. Their shared arc, shaped by love, loss, and transformation, feels fully realised.

Beyond the two leads, the supporting cast is uniformly strong, but special mention must go to Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet himself. The young actor’s performance is astonishingly emotionally aware, bringing warmth, innocence, and startling insight to a role that makes the film’s tragedy all the more painful. Certain moments with Hamnet land with real force, leaving a presence that echoes well after the film has ended.

Structurally, Hamnet unfolds as a collection of moments rather than a traditional narrative drive. Some are sweet, others utterly sorrowful, but together they build a broader meditation on loss and its aftermath. In its final act, the film leans into theatricality to draw a line between private devastation and public expression, illustrating how grief can be reshaped and given voice. Thematically, it builds toward a conclusion marked by bruising honesty.

Hamnet is a film about how loss echoes through the lives of those left behind. It becomes a paralysing weight for some; for others, it finds an outlet through creation. Either way, it is agony, and the film refuses to pretend otherwise. This is not a film I’d blindly recommend to absolutely everyone. Its emotional intensity and deliberate pace demand openness and patience. But for those willing to meet it on its own terms, Hamnet offers a rare, profoundly moving experience — one that lingers in the mind and heart long after the final frame.