A powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of William Shakespeare's timeless masterpiece, Hamlet.
Agnes (Jessie Buckley), an expert falconer, and Will (Paul Mescal), a Latin tutor who longs to be a writer, quickly fall in love, marry and have three children, the happiness of their rustic Stratford-Upon-Avon home only interrupted by Will’s occasional journeys to London to workshop his plays. But when their only son, 11-year-old Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), succumbs to the plague, Agnes and Will face the first severe challenge to their relationship, their grief turning to animosity between them. Chloe Zhao’s (‘Nomadland’) adaptation of the Maggie O’Farrell novel charts the romance between Shakespeare and his wife as the couple experience wedded bliss and then tragedy, inspiring the birth of the Bard’s heralded ‘Hamlet’. Where other films reduce the act of creation to a simplistic cause-and-effect scenario, ‘Hamnet’ far more profoundly investigates how love and art shift in intensity and clarity over time. So much of the movie is meticulously composed, colourful and detailed, that it almost feels like a romantic fairytale. What ‘Hamnet’ leaves you with isn’t sadness, but joy – at the human capacity to reckon with death’s implacability through art, or love, or just the basic act of carrying-on in its defiance. One of the must-sees of the season.
UK/USA 2025 Chloé Zhao 125m
