Hamnet

Hamnet is a 2025 historical drama directed by Chloé Zhao, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Nomadland, adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's acclaimed 2020 novel. Zhao co-wrote the screenplay with O'Farrell, and the film reframes one of literature's great mysteries as an intimate family tragedy, imagining the private grief behind the writing of Hamlet. It was released by Focus Features in the United States and by Universal Pictures internationally.

Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes, the fiercely intuitive wife of a young glovemaker's son played by Paul Mescal, whose name is never spoken but whom the audience understands to be William Shakespeare. When their eleven-year-old son Hamnet dies of plague, the marriage buckles under a grief the two cannot share, until Shakespeare pours it into a play that gives his lost boy's name to its doomed prince. Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, and young Jacobi Jupe round out a cast anchored by Buckley's shattering central performance.

Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival and winning the People's Choice Award at Toronto, long a bellwether for the Oscars, Hamnet became one of the most acclaimed films of the year, earning eight Academy Award nominations and winning Best Actress for Buckley, along with the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Drama. Devastating and tender in equal measure, it is streaming on Peacock.