Toronto/CMEDIA: Executive Produced and directed reportedly by Academy Award–winning director. Chloé Zhao in the United Kingdom in 2025 Hamnet is about William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his family, as seen through the eyes of his thoughtful wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley).
Hamnet, TIFF 2025’S Gala presentation, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel wins the People’s Choice Award presented by Rogers.
Expressing gratitude, Zhao accepted the top audience prize at Toronto via a video link and stressed the importance of making an audience connection with her work.
“I’d like to share that I was very lonely when I was young. And I wrote stories and I drew manga, and I put them on the Internet so that I could read the comments and the reactions of strangers. Whether they liked them or not, I felt connected to them, and suddenly the world is a little less of a lonely place and life seems to have more meaning,” the director recalled in her acceptance speech.
Speculating on the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Chloe presents Hamnet with an emotional force with Buckley and Mescal’s astonishing performances.
The naturalistic and sensitive direction of Chloé helps the heavy emotions take center stage.
The portrait of grief and loss that inspired one of history’s most treasured playwrights testifies to the film’s emotional depth.
Buckley and Mescal always go hand in hand: joy and fear, love and loss in a cycle as old as life itself, and unavoidable.
Shakespeare is presented by Chloé not as a distant and an untouchable genius but as a real man impacted by his domestic life containing joy alongside sorrow.
The forest where Agnes and Will first fall in love is picturised by Cinematographer Lukasz Zal in generous wide shots with the sound designer Johnnie Burn evoking the quiet rhythms of everyday life with an occasional musical assist from Max Richter’s score.
Agnes has a primitive characteristic and when her water breaks with her first child, she slips off into the woods to give birth alone.
William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, celebrate the birth of their son, Hamnet.
Will is a frustrated artist and needs to be among other professionals in London. Agnes understands this and encourages him to pursue his dreams.
But as Will’s career takes off in the city, she grows ever more reluctant to leave Stratford-upon-Avon. Still, their family life remains a happy one when he is home with their only son, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), who is particularly close to his dad, dreaming of working with him in the theater someday.
But it’s while he’s away that unthinkable tragedy occurs and Hamnet dies at a young age leaving both Agnes and Will heartbroken.
As Will heads back to London while the grief is still fresh, he tries to throw more and more of himself into his work.
Agnes retreats, unable to move on and bitter that he wasn’t there when she needed him most.
Chloe uses the context of a family tragedy to one of his most famous works and suggests that by this context readers can better understand Hamlet, considering that it was developed while he was mourning the death of his 11-year-old son, Hamnet.
The tragic loss of his only son at a young age inspired Shakespeare to write his timeless masterpiece “Hamlet”.
Bit by bit, however, Agnes begins to see how Will has expressed his grief through his play that transformed a tragedy into a meaningful masterpiece.
Born in Beijing, Chloé Zhao received a BA from Mount Holyoke College and an MFA in film production from NYU. Her films include Songs My Brothers Taught Me (15), which screened at TIFF Next Wave, and the Festival Official Selections The Rider (17) and Nomadland (20), which won that year’s People’s Choice Award. Hamnet (25) is her latest feature.
