Watched at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.
A beautiful, emotional, and raw tale about the tale of loss, romance, bonds, family, and the surroundings world of the Shakespeare family. I'm so happy Chloe Zhao is back to her roots as her direction on the atmosphere, writing, characters and tone is absolutely remarkable. On exploring the characters, their conflicts and movements, and emotions, within the gorgeous production designs, beautiful camerawork, sound designs and strong powerful direction on the themes and tone was balanced, creative and excellent. Zhao works well on exploring on the normal individuals lives revolving around social class, community and lives. While unlike focusing on the modern era, still, Zhao's approach with the classic era still remains powerful and effective.
The characters were interesting as observing the lives of a couple dealing with their problems, their goals, and the emotions gathering between is pretty good. Especially the performances as Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley and the rest of the cast were fantastic. I'm so happy to see Buckley receiving more recognition as she is very talented and deserves it.
The dialogue is pretty good, the musical score is great, and the writing, although admittedly, certain writing concepts didn't fully work at some points, was engaging, interesting and offered some pretty great themes to explore. Coming out from my screening, I'd overheard some calling this Oscar Bait and I disagree, Oscar Bait movies are much more forced, pretentious and those trying so hard to be so grand and excellent. Hamnet doesn't feel forced, it feels genuine, raw, realistic and at times, a good neo-realism.
Overall, I'm happy for Zhao to be back in her roots for what she is very good with. Definitely one of the best movies from the festival so far.
