Ivan Radford | On 22, Feb 2026

Director: Chloe Zhao
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal
Certificate: 12

There are films that move you and there are films that break you. Hamnet is the latter. Charting William Shakespeare and Agnes Hathaway’s loss of their son, Hamnet, it’s a devastating dive into grief with an unflinching honesty.

Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, it finds William struggling to make it as a playwright in London – something that takes him further and further away from his family in Stratford-upon-Avon. Their kids feel that absence, but not as much as Agnes does – twins Judith and Hamnet dress up as each other to try and trick him when he returns, a motif that continues right up to the harrowing, terrifying moment when Hamnet succumbs to the plague.

Agnes, meanwhile, is something of a village legend, with a knack for healing that’s rooted in the natural world, to the point where her late mother carried the reputation of witch-like powers. We first encounter her in the woods, a place of both darkness and beauty, and her one-ness and awareness of both aspects of life are inhabited with breathtaking naturalism by an enchanting Jessie Buckley. Maggie O’Farrell’s original book didn’t call Shakespeare by his name, grounding us in Agnes’ perspective – and here we feel keenly the disapproval of William’s mother, Mary (Emily Watson), and his bullying father in regards to their marriage.

Paul Mescal, meanwhile, perhaps inevitably gets more space than in the novel to bring the Bard to life – but it’s really an exhumation of a death, as we see Shakespeare shattered by Hamnet’s death, withdrawing and retreating into his despair. The idea of Hamlet becoming a play in which Hamnet’s memory might live on – a memory immortalised in a prism of existential doubt, fear and anxiety – is an easy theory to believe, as O’Farrell and Chloe Zhao’s screenplay finds solace, comfort and pain in such scenes as a ghostly father reaching out to communicate with his son.

Zhao’s direction is masterful in its poetic understatement – she’s the best filmmaker working today when it comes to capturing vulnerability on screen, and there’s an aching, absorbing fragility to every frame, from candlelit anguish to fleeting echoes of childlike playing at sword fights. As the tale culminates in a pin-drop sequence at the Globe Theatre, what Zhao crafts is a thoughtful, mesmerising and utterly heart-rending exploration of how art can help us share and connect in our grief. Nothing else will make you cry as much this year.

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