Hamnet: A Film That Will “Rip Your Heart Out”
If the series Normal People taught us that Paul Mescal wears sorrow like a second skin, and Wild Rose that Jessie Buckley can break your heart with just a look, imagine the two of them together in a story of loss from which "Hamlet" was born. Hamnet is a film about Agnes (Anne) Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare, and their son Hamnet, but also about that thin, invisible place where love turns into art.
The epicenter of this achievement is Buckley, Mescal is its quiet detonation, Zhao directs the story as if restoring the lost balance between nature and civilization. And Hamnet? It is that film after which you don’t leave the cinema “lighter,” but truer. One of those films that will change your life – writes Sombor.info.
Hamnet: Cast, Story, Script, Direction, Premiere
The direction is signed by Oscar winner Chloé Zhao (Nomadland), who, together with writer Maggie O’Farrell, adapted her award-winning novel. We meet Agnes (Jessie Buckley) as a “creature of nature,” a woman who walks through the forest, listens to the world through falconry, and gives birth to her first child under a tree; William (Paul Mescal) is a young Latin teacher, a “useless” dreamer by his father’s standards, but a future poet by all others. Their love is swift and sparkling; the family grows even faster: daughter Susanna, then twins Judith and Hamnet. And then: plague, illness, and the child’s death that splits the family into two continents of grief – hers, quiet and earthy, and his, poured into words, verses, theater.
Zhao does not reconstruct Hamlet as an “origin story,” but suggests how personal pain transforms into a work that changes everything else.
The cinematography is by Łukasz Żal (Ida), and the music by Max Richter (yes, you will hear “On the Nature of Daylight,” and yes, you will be ashamed of how hard you cry).
The world premiere of Hamnet was held in Telluride on August 29, 2025, followed by a gala screening at TIFF. In the United States, the film will open in select theaters on November 27, and for a wider audience on December 12, 2025.
Why Hamnet Is Called a Film That “Rips Your Heart Out”
Zhao insists on the “female energy” of the narrative, not as a genre, but as a balance with nature, the body, and the unspoken. Agnes is the focus, while Shakespeare becomes the one who channels grief into verse, into “the Danish play,” onto the stage where the dead return at least as ghosts. Critics write that the film slips themes of parenthood and loss “under the skin,” but also what comes after: what art does with grief once we give it form.
Variety was among the first to define the tone: “so emotionally raw it’s almost unbearable,” with a “heroic” reading of Buckley. The critic adds that the film deliberately shifts the focus from “who Shakespeare was” to “how pain becomes art,” forcing us to see Hamlet “with new eyes.”
IndieWire’s David Ehrlich delivers one of the season’s most quoted lines: Mescal and Buckley “tear the heart from your chest” in a film that doesn’t chase “recognition” of details, but the tension between intention and echo, between what the artist wants and what the work does to the world (and the family) once separated from him. Agnes is never a cliché, he writes, but “the primal matter of creation,” while Mescal is “cathartically transcendent” precisely when his character cannot heal.
The Hollywood Reporter emphasizes the “fantastic acting that will break your heart,” which does not demand historical accuracy from the audience but emotional truth: how we grieve differently and how theater sometimes reunites us where conversation no longer can. Especially praised is Mary’s (Emily Watson) monologue: “What is given can be taken away at any moment” – the essence of the film in one sentence.
Deadline describes the final block as a “gut punch”: Agnes sits in the front row of the Globe Theatre, expecting a comedy, but receives The Tragedy of Hamlet; the scene in which she realizes what Will has done with their grief is the moment when the film becomes “about art that changes the way we breathe.” Critics also praise Żal’s “candlelit interiors” and Zhao’s “quiet determination” to say everything without excess words.
Vulture calls it “the most devastating film they’ve seen in years,” precisely because through “small” family pain it restores meaning to Hamlet: revenge is replaced by the ritual of remembrance; “to be or not to be” ceases to be binary, because Hamnet “both is and is not,” absent from the home, present in art.
How the Film “Works” on Female Audiences (and Why It Matters to Us)
Hamnet does not sell comfort. It offers acknowledgment: that motherhood and creation are the same movement – your heart leaves your body into another being or into a work. That is why this story of life after tragedy does not close in black, but opens a space for grief to take form, to be spoken of, to be seen, to endure in something greater than ourselves. And that is the place where women’s lives (the ones we care about) stop being “banal”: the film reminds us that the kitchen table, the forest behind the house, the stage, and someone’s notebook – are all one and the same topography of life.
