Hamnet (2025)
Then, the emotions took ahold of me.
The quintessential beauty of cinema is its ability to move you emotionally. As a critic, it’s easy to become numb to how a film can make you feel. You get too bogged down in the performative arts, the architecture of the craft, to allow it to course through you and truly resonate in such a way.
About halfway through Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, I couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed. One of the issues that come with not doing this professionally, and seeing these movies long after countless reviews drop, is attempting to not let what you read or see on a film give you preconceived notions of a film before witnessing it yourself.
I had heard all there was to hear about Hamnet from a critical perspective. I was not immune going in to understanding this is among the top contenders for Best Picture at the upcoming Academy Awards. I knew that Jessie Buckley’s performance is being heralded. I knew it’s on virtually every top critic’s best-of-the-year list.
The critical impulse when reading those things is to treat a film through a harsher lens, like a teacher holding an A-plus student to higher standards. Expectations can be a killer, and it’s a constant internal struggle to suppress those urges and go into a film as open-minded as possible.
About halfway through Hamnet, I had nearly succumbed to those urges. What I had witnessed was technically sufficient, but it was difficult for me to set it apart from some of the best 2025 releases1 I have seen to date.
Then, the emotions took ahold of me.
It’s difficult to not be hyperbolic about how affecting the critical scene is that shapes the plot, but all the accolades being heaped upon Jessie Buckley are justified. Alongside the film’s star is perhaps the best film performance ever given by an adolescent actor as the titular character, played by Jacobi Jupe, which resonated emotionally in a way performers many years his senior have only dreamed of instilling in audiences.
Buckley is well on her way to at least an Oscar nomination, and while the younger Jupe won’t be eligible at the newly named Actor Awards, it will be interesting to see if the accolades pour in for the 10-year-old.
Grief is a common theme, but one that’s so difficult for a filmmaker to accurately convey. It’s an emotion that often comes across as trite, but while the performances of Buckley and the rest of the stellar cast could be seen as melodramatic by a more contemptuous audience, I was enraptured throughout the second half of the film.
Zhao’s work behind the camera was apparent during her breakout film, 2021 Best Picture winner Nomadland, but that film never quite resonated beyond its initial viewing, and ultimately landed in the unfortunate category of Best Picture winners that became afterthoughts almost immediately upon the completion of its contending year.
With Hamnet, Zhao continues that mastery, striking all the right thematic notes from a production standpoint, but right alongside it was a story that earned every single one of the tears that have been shed.
I keep a constantly-evolving ranking of every film I see every year on my Letterboxd profile. You can view my 2025 list here.