Directed by Chloé Zhao | Written by Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, based on O’Farrell’s novel | 125 min | ▲▲▲▲▲ | Amazon Prime

An earlier version of this review appeared on FITI during the coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival 2025.

It starts with a shot of two trees extending out into a leafy canopy, straight and true running parallel to each other — very similar but weathered in different ways. As the camera pans down we see the trunks join down into the earth — this is in fact the same tree. I can’t think of a better visual analogy for the journey of the characters in Hamnet, the couple who come together to make a family, are separate individuals but forever linked. The camera then pans toward the lead character, Agnes (Jesse Buckley), curled up and asleep amongst the roots, just adjacent to a dark cave whose mysteries haunt the film.

This is a love story. Agnes and Will Shakespeare (yes, that one, played by Paul Mescal) cross paths in a village in England in the 16th Century and immediately spark. He’s a tutor to the boys in her family to pay off a debt, with a violent, intolerant father. She’s the eldest daughter who, like her mother, emerged from the woods with a knack for herbal lore. She’s cursed with a wicked stepmother. There’s an element of myth here rooted in the real. The first story Will tells Agnes is about Orpheus and Eurydice.

Yes, history records that Shakespeare was married to a woman named Anne, but this is a fictionalized retelling, and as it points out, Hamnet and Hamlet in that time were the same name, so Anne and Agnes may have been, too.

Agnes and Will start a family, much to the upset of his mother, Mary (a fierce Emily Watson), though she comes around. The kids are loving and playful, especially the boy, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), who dreams of joining his father in London, amongst his players.

The core of the drama comes in the middle act, when Will and Agnes experience a personal tragedy, but respond to it in very different ways. The film provides a fresh perspective to the origins of Hamlet — and at times awkwardly incorporates some of the language of the most well-known of the Bard’s plays — but aside from one occasion makes it all sound fresh in this new context.

This is a film that looks directly at the devastating grief in the death of a child. This is not a Shakespeare biopic, but a distant thematic reimagining, one that cleverly takes time to play its hand leading to an astonishing finale.

What this movie is really about — and how it raises us up from the dark emotionality of that second act — is the healing power of story and how art can offer a strange sort of afterlife.

This is a phenomenal return to her Nomadland form for Chloé Zhao following the unfortunate detour into the MCU, and she’s chosen well her collaborators —  the incredible cinematography by Lukasz Zal, music by Max Richter — even though it pinches a track of his from 2004, previously used in Arrival — with Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes in the producers chairs.

Zhao takes a few big swings and they almost all pay off. We get some clever casting with Noah Jupe as Hamlet and his younger brother, Jacobi, as Hamnet. A nod to the sound editing — wind in the trees has rarely sounded so utterly hypnotic. This is an extraordinarily beautiful movie, an immersive world of green and grey, of dirty fingernails and coarse fabrics.

And as much as the film is Zhao’s in her sterling literary adaptation, it really belongs to Buckley. Her Agnes is volcanic. She’s the foundation of the entire film, the trunk from which every creative branch extends.