TIFF 2025 Review: Love, Grief, and Art Define the Heart Wrenching Drama ‘Hamnet’

Header Image Source: TIFF // Focus Features

Chloe Zhao exploded onto the indie scene with lived-in stories of life in the American margins, where non-professional actors and natural lighting brought an aching realness to the forefront. It won her an Oscar, making her the first woman of colour to win Best Director with Nomadland . After her dip into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, she is back on surer ground but she hasn’t abandoned the more conventional trappings of Hollywood filmmaking. She’s simply applied them to her own style and refined them for this adaptation of the novel by Maggie O’Farrell. And it’s paid off marvelously.

Agnes (Jessie Buckley) is a free spirit whose connection to the natural worl

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