Hamnet (2025): Jessie Buckley's Oscar Winner Is About a Husband Who Builds His Grieving Wife a Forest

Before we meet anyone, there is a hole. In the opening moments of Hamnet, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), in a dress the red of the berries she gathers, lies curled in the roots of an old tree beside a black gap in the forest floor. It looks like a door. She looks like someone waiting by it.

Chloé Zhao's film won Buckley the Best Actress Oscar in March, the same night One Battle After Another took Best Picture, and it arrived with a reputation as the movie that empties tissue boxes. That's true, and it undersells it. Hamnet is the story of a husband and wife who grieve their 11-year-old son in two different languages, hers made of soil and his made of words, and of the night he finally builds her a forest she can walk into. The forest is a play called Hamlet. If you skipped it because it sounded like homework, it's streaming on Netflix in the U.S. right now.

Why It's a Masterpiece

The story, adapted by Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell from O'Farrell's 2020 novel, is simple. A young tutor named Will (Paul Mescal), crushed under a bullying glove-maker father, falls for Agnes, a woman who seems to belong more to the woods than to Stratford. They marry, have a daughter, then twins, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes). Will goes to London to make theater. Agnes stays home. Then sickness comes to the house.

What lifts it above a weepie is how strictly it divides its world. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal has said the forest was Agnes's sanctuary and the cramped family house was Will's trap. Zhao gave him a phrase to shoot by, comparing a man to a rock and a woman to an ocean, and you can see it in the performances. Buckley grieves outward, with her whole body, and refuses to be comforted. Mescal grieves inward, which on screen looks like a man disappearing in plain sight. For an hour you may think he's failing her. The last twenty minutes argue otherwise.

Behind the Scenes

That hole in the forest was never in the script. Zhao told Bradley Cooper in Interview magazine that she had come to the scout straight from Kyiv, where a documentary filmmaker kept sending her footage of a frontline forest pocked with mine holes and dugouts. Standing by a natural hollow under an old tree in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, she sobbed, and decided "this hole has to be at the beginning of the film."

The Globe Theatre got the same instinct. Zhao and her department heads toured the reconstructed Globe on London's South Bank and found it too grand. Zhao pulled production designer Fiona Crombie aside and told her, "ours needs to feel like the inside of a tree." So Crombie built their own at 70 percent scale, largely from reclaimed French oak. Her art director then found a lovely bit of history: the wood for Shakespeare's original Globe had itself been stolen, or let's say reclaimed. Scarred wood, second life. That's the whole movie.

Steven Spielberg, one of the producers, shaped it too. Zhao told TheWrap his main note on the first draft was that it lacked a father-and-son moment, which is how the scene where Will asks Hamnet "Will you be brave?" came to exist. In the edit he insisted, "You need to get us to the Globe quicker," and about fifteen minutes of Agnes mourning at home came out.

On a set this heavy, the cast needed air. Every Friday, Zhao shot a "dance take," usually to Rihanna's "We Found Love." Jacobi Jupe finished his death scene on a Wednesday and went straight to his director: "I just died today. Can we do a dance take, please?" He chose "Stayin' Alive."

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

• Will's clothes are written in ink. Costume designer Malgosia Turzanska dyed his doublets with the same kind of iron-based ink Shakespeare wrote with, giving them a soft gray. The small decorative slashes stand for his father's blows, and after Hamnet dies they widen into gashes across his back, as if he's been whipped. Watch his back in the London scenes.
• One dress, two Agneses. She wears the same dress unlaced, heavily pregnant, when she says goodbye to Will, then laced up and brushed off when she finally travels to London.
• The playbill. When Agnes is handed the bill for the first Hamlet, it lists the actor in the title role as "Mr. Jupe." He's played by Noah Jupe, Jacobi's older brother. Both boys, as Jacobi pointed out to TheWrap, are Mr. Jupe.
• The painted hair. Zhao looked at Noah and told him he looked nothing like his brother, so the crew smeared yellowish paint over his dark hair. Noah's reading: you can imagine Shakespeare backstage, trying to make his son again.
• The camera that won't cut. When the child falls ill, the camera glides above the panic instead of cutting into it. Many scenes were shot from one position; gaffer Sol Saihati says Żal would scoff at the word coverage: "Is that some kind of bitter herb?!"
• Her name. History mostly calls her Anne Hathaway. O'Farrell used Agnes, the name in her father's will, as Slate notes. And Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable names at the time, the tiny fact the whole story grows from.

The Director's Genius Moment

Spoiler warning: This section describes the film's final sequence.

On the page, the ending was plainer. Composer Max Richter told the MPA's The Credits that in the script, Hamlet dies on stage and that's it. Near the end of the shoot, Zhao still wasn't satisfied. Buckley sent her Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight," a piece Zhao didn't know. Listening to it on the way to set, she had what she called a breakthrough and rewrote the ending, then played the piece on set for ten hours a day.

Here's what she built. Agnes arrives at the Globe to find her dead son's name on a play she knew nothing about, and the shock is all over Buckley's face. Will himself plays the Ghost of Hamlet's father, a dead man begging his son to remember him. She stands at the lip of the stage among the crowd, and slowly understands that this golden-haired boy is her boy, given back to her in the only way her husband knows how to make anything. As Hamlet dies, she reaches out her hand to him.

Noah Jupe told TheWrap this grew out of the dress rehearsal, when Buckley was the only person watching, arms resting on the stage, and he found himself saying the lines to her alone. Then something unplanned: Jacobi had already wrapped, but came a day early to watch his brother, and Zhao gave Hamnet a brief, unscripted appearance in the finale. Look behind the actors, at the painted forest on the backcloth. There's a dark doorway in it, designed to echo the hole under the tree from the first scene. Will couldn't follow Agnes into her woods. So he built a forest out of oak and paint and words, put a door in it, and let their son walk through.

Another Way to See It

Zhao, who calls Carl Jung her spiritual teacher, told Cooper she sees Will as spirit and Agnes as matter: she can't rise out of her grief, and he would float away without her weight. That explains why the ending feels like a marriage being repaired, not a play being reviewed.

But there's a less comfortable lens hiding in the cut footage. Zhao told TheWrap that she shot many more scenes of Agnes alone with her daughters and her mother-in-law, Mary (Emily Watson), searching the house for a son she can no longer sense, and that she'd love someone to make a miniseries about the women of Stratford. Seen that way, Hamnet is about who gets to make grief public. Will gets a theater, an audience and immortality. Agnes gets a front-row spot at her own loss. The film's answer, that his art finally lets her grieve, is beautiful. It is also the husband's answer.

What the film understands, better than almost any movie about loss, is that two people can lose the same child and still be alone in the same house. One can't stop feeling it out loud; the other goes back to work and looks heartless. Love, here, isn't feeling the same thing at the same time. It's translation, slow and clumsy, until one of you finally finds the words the other can hear. The movie doesn't promise grief ends. It promises someone might eventually meet you inside it.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, with one caution: if your loss is very fresh, choose your night. Anyone who has watched a marriage survive something it shouldn't have will feel seen. Put the phone away for the last twenty minutes, turn the sound up for Richter, and don't watch it alone if you can help it.

Buckley's Oscar was the first ever for an Irish performer in Best Actress, and she dedicated it to "the beautiful chaos of a mother's heart." The film earned eight nominations in all, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Hamnet is streaming exclusively on Netflix in the U.S., where it landed on July 6, 2026. Under Universal's deal it stays there until about May 2027, then returns to Peacock. For a very different marriage-and-family story from the same Oscar night, read our review of One Battle After Another. And on a rewatch, keep your eyes on that dark doorway in the Globe's painted forest from the moment Agnes walks in. It was waiting there all along, just like the hole in the woods.