Hamnet (2025) ‘TIFF’ Movie Review: A Delicate Portrait of Overwhelming Grief

There’s no earthly reason why “Hamnet” (2025) should be considered anything even remotely akin to a “comeback film.” Such is the lingering effect of franchise-minded myopia, as Chloé Zhao’s tenure in the MCU will forever stand as the first film to stain the series with a “critical flop.”

This branding, however, strikes as entirely unfair to Zhao and her team—it stands to reason that the filmmaker who absolutely shocked Kevin Feige by proposing that a scene be shot with natural light would be far better-suited to an intimate tale of woodland heartbreak than the revolving door of auteurs hired to press record on the camera while the script is written between takes.

Alas, “Hamnet” stands as Zhao’s opportunity to return to everyone’s good graces—you know she won a Golden Lion and a few Oscars just five years ago, right?—and her view of Shakespearean tragedy whispers through the wind with the same broken intonation as any number of the playwright’s distraught subjects of tragedy. This time, though, it’s not one of the Bard’s legendary creations put through the emotional wringer, but rather the legend himself.

Not to suggest that ol’ Bill is the central force that gives “Hamnet” its devastating punch; that honor belongs to his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley), introduced to a young Will (Paul Mescal) in their shared remote village. Pegged by the town as “the daughter of a woodland witch,” Agnes’s keen sense of hereditary intuition and penchant for herbal mixology prove an unfit social match for Will, even as his own standing is relegated to Latin lessons for children meant to pay off his abusive father’s debts.

Love, of course, is often borne from the bonds shared in social isolation, and Will and Agnes quickly consummate their union with a shotgun wedding. Their first daughter is then followed by a set of twins, but the strength of this family’s affection can hardly hold when the Bard begins commuting to London as a means of finding himself and becoming the scribe we all revere. Soon enough, the moment will arrive when Will regrets not having been by his family’s bedside.

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Hamnet (2025) — A still from “Hamnet” (2025)

The little-known inspiration behind one of Shakespeare’s most exalted texts, the story of “Hamnet,” is one that, by the grace of Zhao and original novelist Maggie O’Farrell’s pen, comes to be relayed with a far more muted prose than the playwright’s notorious verbosity. Instead, Zhao returns to her Malickian roots, wherein the rumble of the breeze against dense foliage communicates what an impassioned soliloquy may never manage.

This doesn’t mean that “Hamnet” forsakes the writer’s words in favor of wistful imagery, as Zhao and O’Farrell find direct and poignant use for Shakespeare’s text in key moments of melancholy reflection. The film isn’t necessarily an explanation of how “Hamlet” came to be, so much as it is an exploration of how catharsis can only come from a piece of tragedy that remains to be exhumed and released into the sky with the dreams we kept for it.

The only reason Zhao is able to so fully realize this truth is because of the time she takes to cultivate the love that blossoms between Agnes and Will—a love that’s immediate but carefully preserved under the specter of a contemporaneous gloom. Buckley and Mescal (especially Buckley) are absolutely revelatory in their respective turns, each one fortified in the fragility they see in one another, and the subsequent doubt they cast in the protection of themselves and those they hold most dear.

A single moment, in which Mescal exhibits elated relief followed by unimaginable distress, is a perfect distillation of the power Chloé Zhao finds in the split-second changes that unsuspectingly reshape a human face. “Hamnet” is the collection of features projecting that face as a convincing reflection of every heartache we’ve ever experienced, and every attempt we’ve ever made to find a comforting warmth in the cheek on the face staring back.