Hamnet 4K 2025 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

After the death of her son Hamnet, Agnes remains in Stratford with her children, while William Shakespeare returns to London to write a play that will become one of his greatest works.

Review 4K Movie

Chloe Zhao's film Hamnet is a rare example of a historical drama that fundamentally refuses to be a classic historical biography. This film is not about Shakespeare the genius playwright, not about the writing of Hamlet, and certainly not about literary mysteries. It is a film about what usually remains outside the canon: about family loss, about private pain, and about how great art grows not from inspiration, but from the inability to come to terms with the loss of a son.

Chloe Zhao, a director who knows how to speak more quietly than is customary in big cinema, adapts Maggie O'Farrell's novel not as a historical epic, but as an intimate chronicle of grief. The camera seems afraid to intrude on the characters' space—it observes but does not explain, records but does not comment. This is a fundamentally anti-pathetic film, which is particularly paradoxical given the scale of Shakespeare's figure. Here, he is not a bronze bust or a genius of drama in the process of self-assembly, but a confused man who does not know how to be a father and husband when words — his main writing tool — suddenly prove powerless.

The emotional center of the entire film is not William, but Agnes, played by Jessie Buckley with frightening physical authenticity. Her character is not “the wife of a great man,” but an independent figure, almost pagan, connected to nature, intuition, and the body. She heals with herbs, feels the world with her skin, and seems to know in advance that disaster is inevitable. Buckley plays grief not as an emotional explosion, but as a slow burn: the sorrow of losing her beloved son does not scream here, but eats away at the character from within. Jessie Buckley's performance is the main nerve and true center of Hamnet, and her Golden Globe for Best Actress in 2026 seems like a rare case where the award truly lives up to its meaning.

Hamnet's death — the film's key scene — is shot in an extremely mundane manner, almost cruel in its restraint. There are no musical accents, no directorial “cues” telling the viewer when to cry. Zhao rejects catharsis in the usual sense: pain does not purify, it simply remains. And this is what connects Hamnet to the modern understanding of trauma — not as a single event, but as a process that has no definitive end for a long time.

Paul Mescal, in the role of Shakespeare, plays a man who escapes his grief by throwing himself into his work, into London, into the theater. His creativity here does not rise above life, but, on the contrary, looks like a form of avoidance. Hamlet in the film is not a triumph, but a symptom: an attempt to rewrite loss so that it can be lived with. The title of the play becomes an almost painful homonym, a reminder that art does not heal, but only gives form to pain.

It is important that the film does not romanticize either human genius or human suffering. There is no idea here that the death of a child was “necessary” for the creation of a great text. This is a fundamentally ethical film: it refuses to justify human loss with art. On the contrary, Hamnet asks an uncomfortable question: does art have the right to exist at the expense of someone else's pain, even if that pain is personal?

Chloe Zhao makes films about silence — emotional, familial, historical. It is the silence between lines, between eras, between life and stage. Hamnet does not seek to please the viewer, does not offer comfort, and does not provide answers. It is a film of observation, a film of pause, a film that demands the same from the viewer as it does from its characters: to endure the presence of pain without trying to immediately comprehend it.

In essence, Hamnet speaks about the present day. The film shows how difficult it is for loved ones to warm up, talk through, and survive loss—a problem that is still relevant today. The drama turns out to be more poignant and louder than many, many pompous costume films.