Oscar-winning Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao’s stunning 2025 film Hamnet and two other introspective and intimate Best Picture Oscar nominees this year feature stories of familial tension and loss. Zhao’s intense and beautiful contender for the award joins Sentimental Value and Train Dreams, all of which often convey a great deal in few words.
The film is named for the son of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes (who was also known as Anne Hathaway). As the film tells us at its outset, the name Hamnet was often used interchangeably with the name Hamlet during Shakespeare’s time. Hamlet is, of course, also the name given to Shakespeare’s most famous character, as well as to Prince Hamlet’s father (the late King Hamlet), and to the play that bears their shared name.
Hamnet is frequently, and accurately, described as a film about how Will and Agnes handle their grief over the loss of their son. However, that spoiler (which every film reviewer and plot description I’ve seen has broadcast to the world) does not express how unusual Will and Agnes’s relationship is. A short blurb can’t convey how much the loss of a child affects a family’s world, and in this case, the world at large. Nor does it make clear that neither Will nor his son Hamnet stands at the heart of the film, as one might expect.
It is the earthy and somewhat mystical Agnes who carries the film on her strong shoulders. She immediately impresses us with her forthright nature. The film introduces Will—surprisingly and intriguingly—as her awkward, less self-assured, more inwardly focused partner. This is not the confident and winning playwright whom Joseph Fiennes portrayed in the light and comic Oscar-winner Shakespeare in Love (released in 1998 and written by the late playwright Tom Stoppard). Hamnet shows us a fragile, often melancholic version of Will, a man who loves his family deeply, but is driven by his own intense need to create, and must leave the family’s rural home to pursue his dramatic gifts in London.
Having read much about the impact that grief over the death of a child has on the story, I put off seeing the film. I feared it would leave me devastated, like William Styron‘s Sophie’s Choice and Thomas Hardy‘s Jude the Obscure did. But I didn’t anticipate how co-writers Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell (whose screenplay is based on O’Farrell’s novel) would bring their characters and audience to a point of catharsis as moving as any I’ve seen this year.
It would be misleading to say that it is a feel-good movie. It deals with grief in heartbreaking and believable ways. The cause of characters’ pain doesn’t evaporate when they glean insights or find ways to connect to others through their grief. But Hamnet helps us see how understanding and empathy can create not only essential human connection, but also great works of art. The story examines how grief can help people discover deeper love and greater purpose in their lives and relationships. It does not argue that grief is good, nor that suffering is worthwhile. But it does help us see how even something dreadful can lead us to understand others more deeply or clearly, or impart knowledge that lets us create things we couldn’t otherwise achieve.
The magic at the center of the production is the transcendent performance by Best Actress Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley. She plays Agnes with profound passion, honesty, and heart as the counterpart to Paul Mescal‘s moving performance as Will. In playing a woman who engages with others and the world in an open, direct way, Buckley could have come across as brash. But Agnes’s inability to play the coquette or defer to her family’s desires isn’t selfish or brazen. She simply cannot be untrue to those whom she loves, or to the things she holds dear and believes to be true.
Agnes is bold, stubborn, grounded, and sometimes wary. But there is a purity and sincerity to her that moves her family, and us. In Hamnet, Jessie Buckley delivers an astonishing and luminous performance.
