Hamnet (2025) | Grief & Grace

Chloe Zhao taps into the mystery of Divine Providence

Lately I’ve been thinking about the film Hamnet and why it lingers in the heart long after the credits roll. Part of it is the luminous performance of Jessie Buckley, whose recent Best Actress Oscar felt so deeply deserved. She plays Agnes Shakespeare, the spiritual center of the story and the mother carrying so much hidden grief. In her acceptance speech, Buckley surprised Hollywood by praising her husband Freddie Sorensen and the beautiful, exhausting gift of raising their eight-month-old daughter, Isla. She spoke about the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart and even told Freddie she would have twenty thousand more babies with him. It was a disarming sincerity in a room filled with glamour and ambition, and it felt like such a rare kind of honesty.

And in a way, that moment is the heartbeat of Hamnet. The film draws us into the hidden world behind Shakespeare’s genius, but instead of dazzling us with fame, it brings us into the small, aching, holy spaces of family: Agnes, played with raw intuition by Jessie Buckley; William Shakespeare, portrayed with quiet intensity by Paul Mescal; Mary Shakespeare, given gravity by Emily Watson; and their children, especially young Hamnet, played by Jacobi Jupe, whose presence becomes both gift and wound.

One of the film’s most striking early images is Agnes walking through the forest and summoning a hawk to her glove. The hawk hovers between wildness and trust, much like Agnes herself. It becomes a symbol of her spiritual sensitivity, suggesting how closely she lives at the edge of the visible and invisible worlds, gathering herbs, sensing danger, and holding her family with a tenderness that is both fierce and otherworldly.

Every character is shaped by a love that costs something. Every joy is tinged with sacrifice. Every grief opens into a tenderness that feels almost sacred. Nowhere is that more heartbreaking than when Hamnet, seeing his twin sister Judith slipping away from plague, lies beside her and tries to confuse death into taking him instead. In his childlike love, he offers himself in her place, and the trick works. Judith recovers, while Hamnet falls ill and dies in Agnes’s arms. It is an act of pure self-giving, a child mirroring the logic of the Cross without even knowing it.

This reminds us that family, real and imperfect, is where sanctity is quietly formed. We grow through one another, stretch one another, and sometimes even break one another. Yet somehow God uses these fragile bonds to reveal Himself.

What moved me most was the thread of childlike faith woven through the story. Not childish, but the kind of faith that trusts even without understanding. You see it in Agnes’s fierce hope, in William’s longing for forgiveness, and in the way their children move through the world with openness rather than certainty. It is the same faith Jesus blesses in the Gospels, the kind that can sit in mystery without needing control.

When Agnes finally goes to London to see William’s play Hamlet, she enters the theater with her fists clenched. There is anger in her posture and a quiet fury that he would dare to use the death of their child to create such a work. It feels at first like a betrayal, an appropriation of grief that belongs to their family alone. But as the play unfolds, something begins to change. Scene by scene, the beauty of what William has created softens Agnes’s heart. She moves from resistance to attention until she finds herself standing in awe before the stage.

What she sees is not a diminishment of her son, but a form of preservation. Hamnet is not exploited or forgotten. He is portrayed with dignity, given weight and meaning in a way that allows his life to endure beyond its brief span. On the stage, their child is remembered. In that moment, Agnes realizes that love has found another way to speak. Art does not replace motherhood, but it becomes a vessel through which memory survives and suffering is given form.

Hamnet does not offer neat answers. Instead, it gives us something truer: a reminder that love and suffering often coexist, and that God dwells right there in the middle of both. The film invites us to believe that our families, our heartbreaks, our sacrifices can become places of grace. Not because we are perfect, but because God meets us in the real, hidden places where love costs us something.

That is why Hamnet belongs on a list of films Catholics should see. It whispers that the holy often begins in the ordinary, that family is a vocation of beauty and burden, and that childlike faith can carry us through more than we imagine.

To read more on Hamnet, check out our post on the Best Picture Nominees below.