Chloé Zhao’s films charm audiences not simply through their visual elegance or the accolades they receive, but through their capacity to evoke a subtle, nearly imperceptible transcendence from everyday life. In The Rider, Zhao meditates on a cowboy’s fractured identity, while Nomadland traces elegiac journeys across the American West, revealing an alchemy in which the ordinary becomes scented with a sense of the mystical and the terrestrial is rendered ethereal.

Even in her more commercially contentious work, such as Eternals, brief moments of Zhao’s characteristic lyricism emerge amid the sprawling CGI, demonstrating that her poetic vision of the everyday resists full suppression by blockbuster demands. This sensibility reaches its fullest expression in Hamnet, her fifth feature and one of the most highly anticipated films in recent memory, where the quiet, intoxicating influence of her cinematic style is on complete display.

Hamnet is a film that paradoxically flourishes in its deliberate refusal to hurry. The story, a fictionalized retelling of William Shakespeare and his wife’s experience of losing their son, has been hailed by festival circuits as a landmark of cinematic melancholy, capable of moving audiences. Jessie Buckley’s portrayal of Agnes has earned near-universal acclaim, with critics and viewers alike praising the raw intensity and depth of her performance.

Despite its deep grief, the film resists subjugating the senses or crushing the spirit beneath an unrelenting tide of sorrow. Audiences, particularly those attuned to parental perspectives, may find themselves fully prepared for emotional devastation, yet the film’s careful pacing and subtle storytelling allow the magnitude of loss to reverberate without becoming unbearably oppressive.

Watching Hamnet is not an experience of mere sensory overload. Rather, the film engages on a more instinctive, almost bodily level, where its impact is felt before it is intellectually processed. Zhao, once again collaborating with the distinguished cinematographer Łukasz Żal, famous for his work on Cold War and Ida, which demonstrated extraordinary skill in composition, lighting, and the manipulation of time, constructs a visual world that is at once opulent and disquieting.

The terrains of forests, fields, and riverbanks are rendered with an almost synesthetic intensity: the roughness of bark can almost be touched, the dampness of soil almost smelled, the wind winding via leaves heard, and the hidden vibration under the visible world sensed. Every frame seems devised to immerse the viewer fully, making nature itself a tactile, almost conscious presence within the cinematic experience.

Max Richter’s score does more than accompany these visuals; it permeates them, reverberating through each frame with quiet insistence, while Johnnie Burn’s sound design, haunting and intimate, echoing his Oscar-winning work on The Zone of Interest, draws the audience also into this living, breathing environment. In Zhao’s hands, nature transcends sheer scenery; it becomes a co-conspirator, an active interlocutor in the narrative, and a sensory knowledge at every turn.

From the very first frame, it becomes apparent that the film is a sensory, ritualistic experience over traditionality. Agnes is introduced in a striking overhead shot, curled beneath the immense limbs of a tree in a crimson dress, evoking the image of a forest witch whose bond feels instinctive and unforced. The camera dawdles patiently, allowing viewers to inhabit her presence in a way that outperforms verbal description.

The woods itself functions as more than a mere backdrop; they seem alive, responding and grunting underneath her delicate, human weight. This scene makes it clear that Zhao’s cinematic language is more myth than with traditional plot, where narrative and emotion grow snarled with the very roots of the earth, creating a deeply immersive, almost sacred optic rhythm.

When Agnes encounters Will, who is later revealed to be the Bard himself, their connection is immediate, elemental, and entirely effortless. Their exchanges are playful and tactile, with the camera capturing not only their facial expressions but also the way they inhabit space together. The light and air acknowledge and affirm their adhesive.

The qualities that set Agnes apart in the eyes of the village, her subtle peculiarities and quiet eccentricities, transform into luminous virtues in Will’s presence. Zhao orchestrates these points with a refined sense of bodily lyricism, allowing viewers to experience the joy of two spirits discovering resonance in a way that is uniquely intimate.

Soon, they are married and begin a family, welcoming first a daughter, Susanna, followed by twins, Hamnet and Judith. Yet Zhao resists the urge to hurry toward tragedy, instead luxuriating in the textures of domestic life: the tender, chaotic rhythms of early parenthood, the subtle negotiations of cohabitation, and the mischief of children who exist as fully realized presences rather than plot devices.

Even the supporting cast contributes to the film’s understated weight. Emily Watson, portraying Will’s mother, brings a zeal by age and experience, while Joe Alwyn’s depiction of Agnes’ brother provides a stabilizing familial presence, embedding the story within a network of intimate relationships.

Collaborating with screenwriter Maggie O’Farrell, Zhao subtly evokes a delicate bond between the twins, framing the film’s grief not simply as the result of death but as a meditation on connection, inheritance, and the ineffable ties between parent and child. These sequences possess a gentle fragility, with careful attention to gesture, glance, and sound, allowing Hamnet to unfold in waves that strike a chord with the audience.

The film reaches its rupture with the death of Hamnet at the age of eleven. The characters’ responses are profoundly intense, and both Buckley and Mescal give performances of extraordinary emotional magnitude. Zhao’s method here is unflinching, lingering on the immediate, visceral experience of grief. The pain is neither subtle nor intended to be; it represents an unmediated portrayal of catastrophic loss, the kind that resists reduction into tidy metaphors without risking falsification.

Yet this raw depiction carries the risk of occasionally tipping into what might be described as theatrical excess. The intensity of the performances can verge on shrillness, placing the audience in an uncomfortably close proximity to suffering. Even so, Zhao maintains a careful distance between compassion and manipulation, framing a delicate, uneasy balance that compels viewers to feel deeply without offering the comfort of full catharsis.

This is, in part, why Hamnet must always be viewed in relation to Hamlet. The film frequently suggests that Shakespeare’s greatest play functioned, at least partially, as a means of processing personal grief. This intertextual resonance informs the very structure of the narrative: Hamnet’s death is an ordeal from which art itself seems to arise.

Zhao emphasizes this connection with varying degrees of explicitness, ranging from the nearly literal moment of Will reciting the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy on a riverbank to subtler, invisible cues embedded in mise-en-scène and composition. In both approaches, the film reflects on the alchemical nature of art, the transformation of sorrow into narrative, mortality into language, and absence into presence.

The climactic staging of Hamlet within the film crystallizes this theme in a nearly breathtaking manner. Zhao presents the theater as a living, breathing commodity: the actors’ bodies, voices, and gestures converge into a ritualized collective experience engagement, where grief, memory, and imagination intertwine. Agnes’ reaction, quiet yet intense, mirrors revelation, sunrise awareness of art’s power to contain, express, and even soothe human suffering.

The decision to cast Noah Jupe, the older brother of Jacobi Jupe, who portrays Hamnet, as Hamlet brings a faint, mystical layer, backing the film’s meditation on familial and spiritual continuity. In this gesture, the film seems to suggest that the child who might have persisted, transformed through art, embodied in another body, and living anew within the domain of possibility.

Zhao’s cinematography, already remarkable, approaches the sublime in this sequence. An overhead shot at the turning point frames Agnes’ realization in a way that reverberates the opening representation of her in the forest, establishing a cyclical symmetry between life, loss, and art.

The emotional impact of such visual poetry is weighty: it serves both as evidence of cinematic craftsmanship and as an invitation for the audience to inhabit the film’s internal logic, experiencing it as much as understanding it. In this space, the forest, the river, and the stage exist as related realms, infused with an almost tactile influence that deepens the viewer’s immersion.

Beyond its story and visual achievements, Hamnet functions as a meditation on temporality. Zhao’s intended pacing allows events to unfold in a manner that reflects lived experience: life does not follow tidy arcs, and grief resists neat narrative closure. Ordinary moments, twins squabbling over toys, the subtle exchange of a glance, the quiet comfort of a shared feast, are granted the same significance as moments of dramatic upheaval.

It is within these everyday interstices that Zhao’s sensibilities are most apparent. The ordinary is never treated as mere filler between plot points; rather, it becomes a space of spiritual and emotive resonance. Viewers are drawn into rhythms of reality that are simultaneously mundane and miraculous, experiencing a continual oscillation between the concrete and the ineffable.

Moreover, the film’s soundscape warrants close attention. Richter’s compositions, both delicate and expansive, do more than serve as background music; they act as a metaphysical undercurrent, infusing meaning into the spaces between images.

Burn’s sound design catches the subtle textures of everyday life, the leaves, the vague scratching of floorboards, the wind across water, permitting sound itself to function as narrative. Across her body of work, Zhao always demonstrates that cinema’s power lives in the immersive orchestration of sensory knowledge, composing a world that can be felt as profoundly as it can be seen.

It would be overly simplistic, however, to regard Hamnet solely as an exercise in aesthetic mastery. The film probes the nature of loss, love, and memory with a philosophical subtlety that lifts it beyond the domain of melodrama. Agnes, as conceived by Zhao, occupies an in-between space: deeply connected to the natural world and attuned to mystical currents, yet fully human in her responses to both grief and joy.

Will shares this liminality, existing between historical reality and mythic resonance, representing both the real Shakespeare and the archetypal artist wrestling with mortality and creation. Their interactions with the children and with the surrounding world carry important value and dynamic weight, signaling that Zhao’s emphasis lies in exploring the moral and metaphysical reverberations ingrained in human experience.

The film’s final sequences, culminating in the staging of Hamlet, serve as both denouement and philosophical reflection. Grief is neither erased nor neatly resolved; rather, it is transformed and reframed through the prism of art and imagination.

Viewers are encouraged to understand mourning as an act of creation, where memory and loss can be transmuted into expression, and the life of the mind and spirit persists even after the corporeal has ended. In this regard, Hamnet functions less as a conventional historical drama and more as a meditation on the alchemy of existence, exploring the porous boundaries between inner and outer worlds, between life, art, and the natural universe.

Experiencing Hamnet is a deeply ambivalent journey: audiences are alternately swept away by its visual and emotional richness and gently lulled by beats of quiet, contemplative stillness. Zhao’s filmmaking demands tolerance, focus, and a readiness to surrender to rhythm and sensation rather than conventional narrative expectations.

The film insists on being inhabited rather than simply watched, privileging the affective over the purely cognitive and allowing grief and joy to persist without tidy resolution. In doing so, it illustrates the qualities that mark Zhao as one of contemporary cinema’s most distinctive voices: a filmmaker attuned to the mystical dimensions of everyday life, capable of changing the prosaic into the sublime, and unafraid to stay in the crossing points where feeling, memory, and art congregate in ways that are ineffable yet powerfully felt.

Hamnet represents to cinema’s ability to bear witness, creating an interior space where the most intimate and ineffable existence, love, loss, grief, and remembrance, can be observed, absorbed, and partially comprehended. Zhao’s collaboration with her excellent cast and technical team develops an immersive sensory and emotional environment, one in which narrative momentum takes a backseat to the lived reality of the characters and the elemental poetry of their world.

The film asserts, with quiet insistence, that art is a form of transmutation, a means to articulate grief, preserve memory, and promote the ordinary to the extraordinary. The craftsmanship on display, in sound, imagery, and performance alike, is mesmerizing, leaving a persistent impression prolonged post-credits: an affirmation of cinema’s power to render life in all its tangled, luminous, and tragic beauty.

References

  • Burns, S. (2025). ‘Hamnet’ Is an Absurd Spin on the Story Behind One of Shakespeare’s Greatest Plays. WBUR News.
  • Chang, J. Hamnet (2025) Film Analysis. The New Yorker.
  • Coyle, J. (2025). ‘Hamnet’ Wins TIFF’s People’s Choice Award. Associated Press.
  • de Semlyen, P. (2025). Hamnet Review: Jessie Buckley Is Extraordinary in Chloé Zhao’s Tender Act of Shakespearean Catharsis. Timeout.
  • Egger, B. (2025). Hamnet (2025) Review. Deep Focus Review.
  • Hudson, D. (2025). Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. Criterion The Daily.
  • Lemire, C. (2025). Hamnet (2025) Movie Review & Film Summary. RogerEbert.com.