Film Review - Hamnet (2026)

Hamnet is the new film by Chloe Zhao and stars Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare and Jesse Buckley as his wife Agnes who go through the tragic loss of their son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) which later inspires the Shakespeare play Hamlet.

Hamnet like Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another 2 other Best Picture nominees is a mixed bag for me, on the one hand it is very well directed by Chloe Zhao who adapts to more of a stage play style of directing but it works well, the film also has some great production design by Fiona Crombe and costume design by Malgosia Turzanska both of which feel very authentic to the time period.

The film also has a lot of good performances, Jesse Buckley is great as Agnes and will most likely win an Academy Award for her work here though I do prefer her in roles like Wicked Little Letters or the upcoming The Bride where she gets to play a more wicked and humourous kind of character, Emily Watson is very good as well as Mary while the 3 main kid actors one of them being Jacobi Jupe are good as well.

But this film is also so sad and grim and bleak that after a while I started to not enjoy sitting through it because there are so many scenes of people yelling at each other, yelling in agony, being sad, being angry at one another that it just felt too much but the ending that all of this builds too is very moving to watch and it solicited a number of tears in my cinema session.

And also I didn’t like Paul Mescal as Shakespeare all that much, a lot of the time he either feels distant from the movie around him or Mescal’s performance is so understated and so quiet that you wish someone else was playing the part and after a while that bothered me as well.

And so that was Hamnet and its well made, well performed and builds to a moving ending but the near endless bleak and sad tone bothered me after a while, 2 and a half out of 5.