Hamnet

Chloe Zhao took Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 novel, sat down and co-wrote the screenplay with the novelist herself, and turned it into two hours of the most beautifully upholstered sadness money can buy. The story is simple and merciless: William Shakespeare, his wife Agnes Hathaway, and the death of their eleven-year-old son Hamnet. It premiered at Telluride on August 29, 2025, went wide with Focus Features on December 5, and has now landed on Netflix in July 2026, which means the film that was engineered to make one arthouse crowd weep is officially cleared to make the entire planet cry on the same Tuesday night.

And credit where it is due, because the crying is fully earned by the cast. Jessie Buckley is not acting grief so much as performing an autopsy on it, and the Golden Globe for Best Actress plus the film's Best Motion Picture Drama win are the least the season could hand her. Paul Mescal is right there beside her, doing the quiet, wrecked thing he does better than almost anyone, so you never once catch the leads reaching for it. Zhao shoots the whole thing like a candlelit oil painting that occasionally remembers to breathe, and the result is exactly as devastating and cathartic as every review promised. On pure craft, this is gorgeous, grown up filmmaking.

Here is the catch. This film knows precisely which tear duct it wants, walks straight up to it, and leans on it for the full runtime, and the lever it keeps pulling is a dead child. The critics who called it Shakespeare fanfic were not entirely wrong: it is prestige grief tourism, immaculate and airless, a movie so certain of its own profundity that it never risks a single un-beautiful frame. You will cry, and afterward you may feel very slightly used, the way you do when a magician shows you the trick works every single time. It is a genuinely moving film and a shameless machine at once, and Sally cannot fully forgive it for being so very good at both.

For six months this was a For Your Consideration operation of surgical precision: the tasteful posters, the Telluride hush, the trophy-shaped ad buys, all whispering the word important at a frequency only awards voters can hear. It worked, the Golden Globes duly obliged, and now the exact same devastating study of grief and loss has been quietly rebranded as your cozy Netflix Tuesday, one thumbnail sitting between a true crime doc and a dating show. That is the whole trick: sell the world a two-hour cry about a dead eleven-year-old as prestige in December, then repackage it as comfort content in July. Sally respects the hustle, but calling an engineered sob machine a profound meditation on loss does not make the machine any less a machine.