Hamnet

**TIFF 2025 ** What are we owed by fate? What can we do to change it? Watching Hamnet feels like lying down in the moss, melting into the earth and feeling the roots of a tree pull you deeper. These roots will pierce through you heart body and soul, but as they do you are filled with thousands of years of love and longing. A history stored in our bodies and fertilized in the earth. There is not just a love, but a deep understanding of the power of the forest that I have never seen so beautifully represented on film. Zhaos woods are alive and full of gifts and mysteries. Many filmmakers attempt an appreciation or an understanding of nature, of the forest, the power of women and the power we find in our connection to nature. However simply put, never in my life have I seen a film that shows true understanding and true adoration of this feeling, this phenomenon. You might not relate to Agnes, but you understand her, she will push your boundaries. Grab you by the hand and discern your secrets but somehow you let her, some way she rips the skepticism out of you through the screen. Agnes exists in the water dropping from leaves to feed the soil, in the depth of the moss, the creak of branches in the wind and the song of birds. Agnes exists in this world as much as it exists in her. She brings life to the garden she brings life to the woods, in turn these woods grant her gifts of life and love. Her children blessed with them, her husband a recipient to their rewards. What brings this to life is the cooperation of a magnificent team of artists. Look through Zhaos lens and in Hamnet you will see meticulous construction. As a reader of the novel, I could feel the scribble of creative vision in margins being translated onto screen with a masterful hand. I truly felt as if I was seeing words transformed to image in front of my eyes. Ink turned to light and sound. The filmmakers interest in its source material can make or break an adaptation, and the reverence held for the novel by this films creative team is abundantly clear. Bringing in Maggie O’Farrel, author of the novel as writer and producer on this film is brilliant. There is an unmistakable difference between a film with and without the cooperation of the materials original creator. A mothers dedication, a fathers guilt, a brothers love. Three performances from Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, and the young Jacobi Jupe that relentlessly tug at your sympathies and leave you no choice but to be anything but wrecked. Jessie Buckley is no revelation to fans of her work such as myself, I know the power and the depth of her voice from her prior performances. However here she is somebody new. She is transformed. With every breath, every movement, every step, the complete embodiment of character becomes more and more clear. Her pain reaches far beyond the realm of screen, beyond the story world, into thousands of years of women’s suffering. She screams for herself, for her own pain, and what echoes through the audience body is our own screams, the screams of our mothers and our sisters, the women we know and love. Screams of rage, screams of agony, screams of injustice. Suffering that lives in our bodies and is passed down through the nutrients of our bones. Mescal brings forth a vivid image of a Shakespeare we’ve never known. A suffering man, a man who when he needs to cannot string together a few futile words. A man who paces circles around his lover, who is awkward and bewitched. There are glimpses of William Shakespeare the artist, William Shakespeare the brilliant playwright, but what we gain from the humanity and warmth of Mescals performance is knowledge of Will, the father and the husband. The man who wept, who had nowhere else to turn, who saw his wife’s magic fail to save the life of his son and turned to words to bring him back. Turned to his only power, the scratch of ink on paper where his wife’s spoken words and remedies failed to suffice. A pint sized power house, Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet himself determines the fate of this film. There is no tragedy, there is no pain in the loss, there is no throb of absence if who we lost does not hold our hearts in his hands. Hamnet is sweet, he is warm and he is adoring. He is a part of his sister, his Judith. Hamnets very spirit is that of a boy filled with nothing but love, endless love for his father, for his sisters for his mother. He is warm and radiant, until he breaks you. At the most pivotal moment in Hamnet, Jupes performance is pure magic. Spellbinding, enchanting, spun gold is wrapped gently around you before it pulls tight, suffocates you and leaves you bleeding. Hamnet is perfect. Hamnet is the power felt surging through your hands when you press them to a tree. Hamnet is the release of pain when two hearts beat in tandem, close in embrace. Hamnet is all of the love, the pain, the knowledge, the intuition, and the magic that is born into women.