Hamnet (2025), dir. Chloé Zhao

Chloé Zhao's stunning adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's titular novel recasts Hamlet as a story of grieving parents who find closure and catharsis in different ways.

Jessie Buckley plays Agnes (pronounced French-like, with a soft 'G') who, it seems, comes from a line of witches (her mother emerged from the forest and caught the eye of her father). And Agnes, just like a witch from a Shakespearean play, can tell foretell someone's future by grasping their hand.

William Shakespeare spies Agnes from afar whilst teaching her younger brothers Latin, leading to a courtship equal parts feral and tender. Agnes gets pregnant and William marries her despite both their families' objections.

Agnes bears William a daughter, and then twins (the latter a fraught birthing, giving them a boy and a girl named Hamnet and Judith). William's unhappiness at being forced to journeyman in his father's leather craft leads him to leave (abandon?) his young family in Stratford-Upon-Avon for London to pursue his dreams of writing for the theatre.

This young family really begins to fray when the younger daughter Judith falls deathly ill to the plague. In a twist of fate befitting the Bard, it is Hamnet who catches the disease and dies, whilst Judith recovers. Here, Chloé Zhao drives home the point how much grief women carry, especially given the high infant mortality and low life expectancy in those days. Veteran actor Emily Watson plays Shakespeare's mother, whose short yet powerful monologue during this act brings this point across sharply and elegantly.

Paul Mescal brings his trademark brooding masculinity to his performance of Shakespeare. This Shakespeare is still a tortured artist, yet Mescal makes it earthy and sexy. The real showstopper, however, is Jessie Buckley. She plays Agnes with vulnerability and fearlessness, and the grief she embodies is continental and volcanic, yet somehow manages to be authentic, not exploitative. Where Chloé Zhao used the vast landscapes of the American Midwest as a character, here she uses the faces (and bodies) of finest Irish actors of our generation as her canvas to explore the last thing most of us want to face: the death of an offspring.

It is in the finale of the film, its final 15 minutes, that Chloé Zhao unleashes a singular act of catharsis and artistic genius. As Agnes goes to watch William's first staging of Hamlet in the Globe, Shakespeare's play is reconfigured into a grieving mother watching a future that she foresaw but not in the way she expected, as a spectre of her husband embraces her dead son.

This film should open in January, and if you're a Chloé Zhao fan from Nomadland or (gasp) The Eternals, you will want to catch this. Zhao wields cinema's powers to place us directly into a character's perspective, all to heighten and depict live theatre's ability to transcendently livewire-connect with a live audience. Hamnet's ending is one of the most dazzling alchemies of cinema and theatre I've seen.