HAMNET
Genre: Drama
Directed by: Chloé Zhao
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal
Release: November 27, 2025
Platform: Theatrical
Rating: 5/5
By Crystal Justine
“A film best experienced in a theater, surrounded by an audience breathing, crying, and breaking alongside you.”
HAMNET is the most devastatingly stunning film to hit the big screen this year. Writer/director, Chloé Zhao, proves exactly why Hollywood needs more Asian women behind the camera. When they’re allowed the space to create without heavy handed oversight (MCU), they deliver works that are visceral, magical and unforgettable. In recent years we’ve seen this type of magic from Celine Song with Past Lives and Hikari with Rental Family. HAMNET sits comfortably beside these memorable films—guttural and feral, yet soft, organic, and deeply human.
Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel, the film reimagines the life of William Shakespeare and his family. Novel-to-screen adaptations often lose their soul, but Zhao lets the story unfold like a moving poem—never forced, never rushed. Her writing strikes the perfect balance between shaping characters and giving the actors room to breathe, exist, and reveal themselves in real time.
Jessie Buckley delivers a performance that borders on frightening in its immersion. From the moment she enters the camera’s frame, the actress disappears. What remains is Agnes with every sigh, every whisper, every glance lived in fully. Buckley is a force of nature, easily the frontrunner this awards season for Best Actress. This role feels destined for her; no one else could have carried the emotional weight of this film with such ease and beauty.
Paul Mescal is excellent as always, bringing his trademark sincerity and emotional depth. The supporting cast is exceptionally strong, but the young actors playing Shakespeare’s children stand out, particularly Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet. His joyous smile is infectious, and the heartbreak he delivers with nothing but his eyes floors you. He wasn’t even thirteen when filming this, yet he commands the screen like someone doing the job far beyond his years.
Some critics have called HAMNET “emotionally manipulative”, but there’s nothing contrived about it. The film doesn’t gnaw at your heartstrings. It simply tells the truth, and the emotional impact hits hard because of that honesty. The audience reactions say everything: soft sniffles, quiet tears welling, and at times, uncontrollable sobbing.
The cinematography is breathtaking. It marries the raw beauty of nature with a building darkness that pulls you under. The color palette, the lighting, the framing—every shot is deliberate and picturesque. Early scenes in the lush wilderness feel alive, and the final sequence inside the reconstructed Elizabethan playhouse carry a level of emotional and visual power that’s hard to shake. Many of these images deserve to be stopped in time and hung on museum walls.
HAMNET is easily one of the finest films of 2025, if not the finest. Steven Spielberg stated that Chloé Zhao is a “miracle,” and after this, it’s hard to disagree. This is the kind of film you revisit and find just as staggering each time. It belongs on the shelf with timeless period pieces, like Pride & Prejudice and Atonement—stories that never age, never lose relevance, and remain endlessly beautiful. It’s a film best experienced in a theater, surrounded by an audience breathing, crying, and breaking alongside you.
