‘Hamnet’ Review: The Holiday Release Generating Oscar Buzz

LOS ANGELES, CA — Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” is a meditation on absence, a film of piercing poignancy where Jessie Buckley’s devastating turn and Paul Mescal’s fractured Shakespeare anchor grief transfigured into legacy — a wound that both mourns and remembers.

A boy. A fever. A mother’s trembling hands. A father’s absence. Silence. Then loss.

From these fragments emerges “Hamnet,” not as a conventional period drama but as an elegiac adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel — a lament of loss that reimagines the death of Shakespeare’s son as the ghost that haunts “Hamlet.”

Known for the grounded intimacy of “The Rider” and the sweeping lyricism of “Nomadland,” Zhao carries her vision into Elizabethan England. Think Terrence Malick’s contemplative style in “The Tree of Life” and “The New World” — a sensibility Zhao echoes while keeping her gaze rooted in the household, where domestic rhythms pulse against landscapes that mourn.

Rather than pursuing the Bard’s genius, the Oscar-winning director turns inward to his wife Agnes (Buckley), their son Hamnet (Jacob Jupe), and Shakespeare himself (Mescal). At first, the family breathes with warmth: laughter in candlelit rooms, rituals of care, the rhythms of daily life. Then Hamnet falls gravely ill and the tide shifts.

Far away, Shakespeare is in London, chasing ambition. By the time he returns, Hamnet is gone. The searing void casts its long shadow over the tragedy: Agnes consumed by mourning, William scarred by regret. What begins in intimacy collapses into devastation, less about history than a family’s wound that becomes the seed of Shakespeare’s greatest work.

Anchoring the film is Buckley’s elemental performance as Agnes — fierce, mystical, devastating in her sorrow. Her voice cracks with urgency, her hands tremble in ritual care, her gaze pierces through stillness.

Opposite her, Mescal inhabits Shakespeare not as the mythic playwright but as a man fractured by ambition and hollowed by loss — subtle and restrained. His voice trembles, his words falter, his eyes avert in regret — a sorrow no less crippling than Buckley’s immediate mourning. Mescal’s performance carries a naturalistic effect, devoid of Shakespearean declamation, grounding the character in lived experience rather than theatrical myth.

Jupe’s Hamnet glows with fragile luminosity — his laughter quick, his breath shallow, unforgettable. Their only son is the light of their eyes, every glance toward his parents suffused with reverence. His fleeting life becomes the film’s heartbeat.

The film’s power lies not only in performances but in craft — director, cinematographer and composer shaping sorrow into form.

Zhao’s vision is spare yet immersive, evoking Elizabethan life without romanticizing it. Stillness is her most potent instrument — orchestrating rhythm, fracture and presence in ways words cannot.

Łukasz Żal’s cinematography and Max Richter’s score extend Zhao’s vision into sensory experience. The camera renders mourning in textures of light and shadow while Richter’s motifs whisper through the void, amplifying sorrow without sentimentality. Together, they create a world authentic yet poetic, intimate yet resonant.

For all its lyrical power, “Hamnet” sometimes risks detachment under the weight of its restraint. Zhao’s refusal to dramatize loss in conventional terms — no sweeping melodrama, no cathartic release — may leave some viewers at a distance.

The pacing is deliberate, even glacial, and the austerity can feel heavy. Yet this restraint is what gives the film its haunting power, turning absence into meaning. She trusts the audience to sit with mourning rather than escape it.

In Zhao’s hands, the death of a child is reframed not as a historical footnote but as loss transmuted into transcendence — the scaffolding of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. The result is a film both raw and profoundly beautiful, insisting on the dignity of sorrow and the necessity of art. Loss mourns, loss remembers — and in remembering, it becomes creation.