TIFF 50: "Hamnet" is Chloé Zhao's best film to date
Wednesday, September 17, 2025 at 12:00PM 
Another year, another TIFF coverage extended far past the festival's end. When one watches as many films as I try to at such events, I guess this is inevitable. Getting sick just as I was about to leave Canada and cross the Atlantic back home didn't help matters, but I'm back on writing duties and ready to share my thoughts on a number of exciting new titles. NYFF, which I'll cover digitally, is still a week and change away, so that can serve as the deadline to wrap up this celebration of TIFF's 50th edition - Happy TIFFTY!
So, let's begin again, starting with the drama that reduced the northern metropolis to tears and secured Chloé Zhao a place in history as the only director to have won the TIFF People's Choice Award twice. And it's well deserved, as Hamnet represents the filmmaker's finest achievement yet…
Adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's prize-winning novel by Zhao and the original author herself, Hamnet considers the bottomless pit of grief from which one of history's most immortal plays was born. It's the story of William Shakespeare before his name suggested something much larger than a simple human should encompass. But, more importantly, it's the tale of his much-forgotten wife, Agnes. The film imagines their meeting and the genesis of romance, the conception of a life shared with three children, and the split that came after. Just as defined by love as by loss, Hamnet hinges on that fateful morrow when the ripper visited the family, its patriarch far from home as he often was, and carried the prodigal son away.
The first two acts are the film's strongest, but the final third is where the text's thesis emerges fully formed, pulsing desperately like an aching heart that keeps on living through the pain. For it all comes to an end at the Globe, as the Hamnet his parents loved became the Hamlet the world knows, fiction gifting him the life he never got to grow into. In that, the father imagined himself trading places, becoming the ghost his son now was and allowing the boy to breathe a moment longer, the bargain any mourning parent wishes they could make with God. And if Death still comes, it comes for all, bringing a family back together in a gesture that is both merciless and most merciful.
As art shared with the public, private grief spreads in a communion like none other. Surely, it does not expiate all the suffering of the parent or the guilt of the survivor. Yet, there's something indescribably moving about seeing an entire theater's audience do like the dead boy's mother and reach for the actor playing a facsimile of him, as if trying to hold him, keeping him from going, from slipping away. Specificity beckons communal recognition, and so Hamnet rises as that rare work that could probably squeeze tears out of a stone. Speaking only about my experience, I must have cried for twenty straight minutes near the end.
Many will want to credit such impact to the work of one woman, Jessie Buckley. And, indeed, she is sublime as Agnes, embodying all the detail contained in the novel and expressing the woman's mysteries according to this new medium's needs, strengths and limitations. Intuitive, earthy, she could be alienatingly mystical if not for the clarity in the actress' work, which, by the film's end, seems to encompass everything from the highest joys to the darkest despondencies. Buckley has never been better, not even in Beast or Wild Rose or The Lost Daughter, charging at the part's challenges like a bull that sees red. She sinks her teeth into Agnes with gusto while keeping herself from crossing the threshold of excess.
The thespian's accomplishment is emotionally immense but rigorous, much like her director's, whose efforts are even more vital for Hamnet's success. For sure, I am a new convert to the Oscar-winner's talents after struggling through some of the adoration she received for Nomadland. In fact, despite earning ample success and the trophies to prove it, Zhao has received plenty of harsh criticism over her short career. One of the main points of contention with those who resist her work's appeal refers to a sense of derivation in how she approaches the moving image. Malickian is an overused term when describing Zhao's oeuvre, but it wasn't wholly unjustified until now.
Because Hamnet, while still invested in the majesty of the natural world, its cathedrals and sublimity, goes against much of the audiovisual playbook that had defined the director's work and condemned her to bitter comparisons. Rather than moving, free-flow through the space, the camera is often still, letting entire scenes play out in a wide master shot that elides the close-up where other cineastes would have given in to temptation. There's a newfound discipline in Zhao's visual language, a formal severity that, if anything, makes the unraveling of the lives framed within its bounds hit more violently than it would have otherwise.
I'm reminded of two birth scenes and a death. The first of these is conveyed in a register of quasi-divine distancing, keeping Agnes deep in the forest and the composition, lost among the foliage for an extended long take. Then there's the agony of the second birth and its reflection of the death scene. Together, they represent a remarkable piece of staging that acknowledges a shared experience while still keeping us centered on Agnes' pain. Static compositions privilege her through focal clarity, but keep the surrounding women in sight, each sharing the moment but lost in the maelstrom of their own anxieties and, ultimately, their overwhelming grief.
Then there's the aural dimension of Zhao's vision. For a project so fundamentally fettered to a wordsmith's legacy, Hamnet isn't much concerned with the sound of spoken words. Instead, it respects silence above all. For long passages, it'll stay put with no verbiage and no music either, banishing dialogue and Max Richter's weeping score – we will never escape "On the Nature of Daylight" – to better consider the richness of silence, its textures and seductive secrets. Sometimes, it's absolute and all-consuming. In other instances, Johnnie Burn and Brendan Feeney find necessary variations in these sonic absences.
They dirty up the void with the rustle of faraway leaves, wind and wet ground gasping for breath. Or maybe they appeal to the groaning of a wooden structure in the shape of a home and the hunger of a stomach slowly digesting its inhabitants. Pardon the appeal to Shakespearean text, but it feels close to what's done in Julius Caesar and Macbeth, where the environment's sonic disruptions parallel the role of a Greek Chorus. Which makes sense when one considers that the film is much more invested in the shadow of Agnes' husband than its source. Such is the nature of adaptation, resulting in distinct works that, hopefully can stand on their own right.
Among the novel's elements whose culling I most mourn is O'Farrell's exploration of what abuse can do to a family, how domestic trauma sinks into people, changing them inexorably, killing who they might have become if unburdened by such sorrows. There are elements of the Bard's suffering under paternal violence, mostly communicated by wincing reactions to harsh words and the possibility of punishment, how the actors tentatively move around each other in the Shakespeare family home, the unacknowledged cuts that often ornament Mescal's brow, a plea to his young son in the moment of departure.
Concerning adaptation, there's also the matter of a collective mural reduced to individual portraiture. The chronological back-and-forth juxtaposing the shared history of Agnes and Will with the wretched day of Hamnet's demise is gone. Moreover, the book's generosity toward every peripheral character goes along with it, losing much of what made it sing as a reckoning of what family means and how it works, flourishes, withers, dies, survives. The role of Mary, the Bard's mother, is especially diminished. So, thank heavens for Emily Watson, who does some miraculous work on the margins of scenes and devours a slim soliloquy on maternal kinship, clearly added to compensate for what was excised.
Other additions are less successful. Early on, an appeal to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice feels a tad too blunt for the gossamer mood-piece that Zhao's intent on making. The worst of the worst comes near the beginning of the film's last act, when the poet broodingly recites Hamlet's most famous passage - "to be or not to be" - while he, himself, contemplates the deadly embrace of the river down below. If the film has one significant flaw, it's that aforementioned expansion of Will's role. Again, it hints at his future greatness from the get-go in what almost feels like an IP play or a serious underestimation of the audience's attention span.
It doesn't help that Paul Mescal is the weakest link in an incredible ensemble that includes a small coterie of child actors who outperform him at every turn – a round of applause for Jacobi Jupe, please. That's not to say he's bad. Like much about Hamnet, the Irish star's best moments arrive early in the narrative's straightened chronology. While he's far too old to play teenage Shakespeare, Mescal gets the boyish awkwardness just right. The greatest playwright in the English language feels small, even silly, endearingly human in his difficulty to communicate with the woman who's taken his heart into her grasp and not let go.
And yet, for all the acting excellence on display, the most impactful manifestation of a parent's woe arrives in the form of Fiona Crombie's set design. As Hamnet bravely faces Death, the camera finds him alone on a stage of shared imaginations. Through the open weave of a cloth veiling the lens, Zhao spies him against the painted backdrop of a forest, the universes and beliefs of father and mother joined to embrace their child as he ceases to be. The theatrical simulacrum of a witch's woods is a liminal space of transition and sorrow and a strange sort of kindness. A gentleness, from those who stage this story, to that little boy who really died, all those centuries ago, in Stratford-upon-Avon, taken by the plague and forever remembered on stage, whether players and audiences realize it or not. We are all part of perpetuating his memory and the echoes of his parents' love.
Focus Features will release Hamnet on November 27, for a limited run that expands wide on December 12.
Reader Comments (6)
As a Toronto resident, a lifelong film lover, and a former TIFF-goer, I am over the festival and its pathetic fawning over industry elite.
Please take the festival to another city and give us our movies back.
Really,is it really fawning or simply promoting.
I'm halfway through the novel and really enjoying it but I'm unsure if finishing it will spoil my experience watching the movie, as film adaptations hardly fare better than their source material. Would you recommend putting the book on pause and coming back after watching the movie?
Lucky -- They are different animals as it befits their different mediums. I read the novel before watching the film and felt that the last act suffered from my mental comparison to the book's comparable contention. But I met people at TIFF who had the opposite experience and felt reading the novel enriched their experience considerably, especially when seeing the written interiority of the characters come across in the actors' work.
So do as you feel more comfortable. There's no right or wrong answer. I loved the novel more than the movie, but two-thirds through, Zhao delivers a very smart adaptation. It's that last third that gives me pause.
Thanks for replying so fast :)
I think I'll keep reading
Lucky -- Happy reading! Or, well, maybe happy isn't the best word to use. Heaven knows how I cried my way through the eight-hour flight to Toronto, thanks to HAMNET.