Film
fromVulture
12 hours agoThe Year's First Oscars Villain Has Arrived
Emotionally potent films like Hamnet can derail frontrunners and function as perceived 'villains' during Oscars-season storytelling.
Among one of the heralded festival favorites to make its Canadian premiere was Chloé Zhao's breathtaking adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's "Hamnet." Rich in beauty and astounding performances, "Hamnet" is a stunning domestic drama set in the household of William Shakespeare, but with a twist: in this retelling of the Bard's life, it is his wife who is the real subject of the movie.
Chloe Zhao's adaptation of Hamnet has won this year's people's choice award at the Toronto film festival. The acclaimed drama, based on Maggie O'Farrell's award-winning novel, stars Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal and tells a fictionalised account of William Shakespeare and wife Agnes as they grieve for their young son. The award has come to suggest future Oscar success with every recipient from 2011 to 2023 scoring either a best picture nomination or a win.
Understandably, the scarcity of our insight into the life of Hamnet and his family has inspired writers and artists over the years to fill in the details with their own imaginings. As an opening quote from Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt reminds us, in both Maggie O'Farrell's haunting 2020 novel Hamnet and Chloe Zhao's new adaptation of it: "Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries."