126 min | PG-13 | November 26, 2025 | Focus Features
A grief story that earns every tear without manipulating you into them. The rare prestige period piece that trusts its audience.
I went in braced for Oscar-bait treacle. A movie about Shakespeare’s dead son inspiring Hamlet has every opportunity to drown in its own self-importance. Instead, Chloé Zhao and her collaborators deliver something restrained and devastating. The emotional beats land because they’re earned, not engineered.
The central conceit is brilliant. Agnes and Will’s love story becomes the proto-muse for the most famous play ever written. You watch their marriage fracture under grief, and you understand where Hamlet’s obsession with death and betrayal and the impossibility of action comes from. The film doesn’t beat you over the head with it. You just feel the threads connecting. It’s a perfect device to build a movie around because it makes you see something you thought you knew completely fresh.
Paul Mescal delivers career-best work here. His Will is a man who lives at a slight remove from his own life. You can see him filing away every painful moment for later use. There’s a scene where he watches his family grieve and you catch him observing rather than feeling. It’s subtle and devastating. He makes you understand how an artist can be both deeply present and fundamentally absent. Buckley matches him beat for beat. Her Agnes is fierce and grounded where Will floats. The tension between them feels lived-in rather than performed.
Łukasz Żal’s cinematography deserves its own paragraph. The visuals don’t just serve the story. They become a character. Candlelight flickers across faces in ways that feel dangerous and intimate. The English countryside looks beautiful and brutal. Mud and thatch and rough wool textures fill every frame. You can almost smell the world. The camera finds angles that make familiar domestic spaces feel strange and charged with meaning. It’s the kind of photography that reminds you what cinema can do that nothing else can.
The craft across the board is remarkable. Costumes and sets feel inhabited rather than curated for a museum. The dialogue threads the needle between period-appropriate and accessible. Sam Mendes and Steven Spielberg as co-writers on a Chloé Zhao film wasn’t on my 2026 bingo card, but the collaboration works. Everyone brought their best.
More of this, please. Studios should take notes. You can make a prestige film that respects its audience’s intelligence and still hit them right in the chest. This is how you do it.