By the time “Hamnet” reaches its final act, the air in the theater feels charged with the kind of silence only possible after sharing a unique and resonant experience. When the credits rolled at the screening I attended, not one person rushed for the aisle.
Directed by Chloé Zhao and adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, “Hamnet” follows William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (also known as Anne) Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), from courtship to parenthood to the death that upends their lives. Released in U.S. theaters on Nov. 26, 2025, the film has already drawn awards-season attention and merits the praise it has received.
Written over four centuries ago, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” tells the story of a prince consumed by the demand for vengeance, and it has been endlessly adapted, deconstructed and reimagined ever since. Zhao’s film enters that lineage by looking behind the tragedy to imagine the family loss that may have helped inspire it: the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, Hamnet—a name that, in Shakespeare’s time, could also be written as “Hamlet.”
Although the movie beautifully portrays loss and grief, one weakness is its pacing, especially early on. Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), whose life and death anchor the film, does not appear until more than a third of the way through, leaving the opening stretch to function largely as a prologue focused on Agnes and Shakespeare’s meeting and marriage. In addition, the film underutilizes what makes its characters distinctive. It bills itself as Shakespeare’s origin story, yet aside from a few scenes near the end of the introduction, it could just as easily be about two ordinary people. The introduction includes two graphic childbirth sequences as well, both uncomfortably prolonged. Still, this groundwork is undeniably moving, and it succeeds in making the audience invest in William and Agnes as a couple.
Another questionable decision is the film’s portrayal of children as improbably mature. One moment, the eleven-year-old Hamnet and his twin sister, Judith (Olivia Lynes), are playfully sparring with toy swords; the next, they are reflecting eloquently on the nature of mortality. These flaws do undercut the film at times, but they don’t outweigh the many things it gets right.
One of Zhao’s most intriguing choices is her use of unexplained fantastical and supernatural elements in an otherwise grounded story. Moments such as Agnes’s cave-bestowed ability to see the future, or Hamnet tricking death into taking him instead of his sister, seem as though they ought to be off-putting. Because even the strictly historical scenes are suffused with mystical elements, however, a little literal magic doesn’t register as a rupture. It reads, instead, as an extension of the film’s emotional logic: grief made visible.
The film’s smaller historical touches are also impressive. The set for the Shakespeare home closely resembles the real location (which I visited several years ago). Shots of the Old London Bridge show it crowded with buildings, a feature that persisted into the eighteenth century. Period detail of this kind deepens the film’s immersion and amplifies its emotional power.
All this, however, is secondary to the film’s governing grief: Hamnet’s death. It occurs about two-thirds of the way through, but it haunts the entire production. Even the family’s happiest scenes unfold in its shadow. Like the great Shakespearean tragedies, including “Romeo and Juliet,” “Macbeth” and “Hamlet,” the ending is effectively disclosed before the story begins, turning the plot into a mournful, unalterable descent toward an inevitable collapse. Unlike its Shakespearean counterparts, however, Hamnet attends not only to the buildup but to the aftermath.
Hamnet’s death is as painful and drawn out as Hamlet’s, leaving the audience breathless and in tears. It sets in motion the final, and most moving, act of the film, in which Agnes and her husband reconcile and begin, however haltingly, to live after the loss of their son. The movie closes, in another allusion to the original tragedy, with a play within a play: the first production of “Hamlet” at the Globe Theatre. The passionate and poignant performance, interspersed with long pauses, ends the film perfectly, allowing Hamnet’s memory to be put to rest.
Overall, “Hamnet” is an extraordinary piece of cinema. It certainly isn’t perfect, but its imperfections fade beside the force of its feeling. What it offers the viewer isn’t instant catharsis, but an unusually honest depiction of the slow process of mourning; its power lies in its refusal to hurry sorrow toward resolution. Few recent movies convey loss so acutely or let silence do so much of the work.
