'Hamnet' (2025): Review

You're not prepared for how this film will hurt you...

I was not prepared for Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. To say it’s a gut punch is like saying brain surgery is invasive.

The framing is gorgeous, the quiet story of Agnes and William Shakespeare’s romance. He’s a tutor paying off his father’s debts. She’s the odd daughter of a forest woman with some small awareness of the numinous who leans into herbal magic and the old, unspoken ways.

This film is very much her story, and theirs after the plague takes the titular Hamnet. We see how hard life is, how sickness takes even the healthiest children and the bargains one twin will make for his sibling.

Buy this is not a gentle film. Every moment of import is horrific, from the creeping tide as Agnes gives birth to Hamnet and Judith to the horror of his passing from the plague. His death might be gentle but what his mother experiences is certainly not.

Hamnet is not technically the focus. The film is more about his effect on those around him, mainly his parents.

William escapes his grief in London via a play called The Tragedy of Hamlet, which he hides from Agnes. She then travels to London, after seeing a flyer, in a mix of grief and fury. She’s confused at the Globe—a gorgeous use of the rebuilt theatre—in the stands near the stage. This play uses her son’s name but it’s about a prince in a foreign northern land (well, Denmark) leaving her angry and confounded.

But, when King Hamlet’s ghost appears—played by Shakespeare—and the young prince comes on stage, he is an older version of Hamnet. The same hair, the same love of fencing and passion dfor the stage. It becomes a transformational event and, as the actor feigns Hamlet’s in-stage death, Agnes sees her son in the player’s form as he walks off-stage and into the afterlife.

It’s beautiful and binds the audience with him for a single moment as she takes the dying actor’s hand—already established as a way she can see that person’s future—and sees her son in his place. A thing which happened months before for her, but is still happening for him. Despite his earlier fears as he transitions from here to there, Hamnet gets to fulfil her prophecy and act on stage as one of his father’s players.

And it hurts. The entire film, bar this scene, feels scored with the wind, thunder and rain, the movements of the natural world Agnes is so attuned to. But as Hamnet transitions, a familiar track plays—borrowed from Arrival, another film I love, which also gut punches you appropriately. It’s Max Richter’s emotional piece “On the Nature of Daylight” and it is the perfect track to end the film, abrupt as that ending is.

This is a story about a playwright and the lives which shaped his, about the bride who fell for him despite seeing his probable future. It’s about one twin who gives up his life to save his younger, weaker sister. And it’s perfect, and emotionally devastating…

I love it. I never want to watch it again. I cried, I grieved, I walked away knowing this was a masterpiece. But it will break you on the way…

Please, go and watch it as soon as you can. Bring tissues, you’ll need them.

Hamnet is now showing in UK cinemas.