Sightlines · reception
How Hamnet was received
2025 · Chloé Zhao · Hamnet on Sightlines
The arc
Landed as the sob-heard-round-the-festival-circuit — it won the TIFF People's Choice Award in September 2025 and instantly became the Best Picture frontrunner, before awards season recast it as the noble runner-up: Jessie Buckley took Best Actress while One Battle After Another swept Picture and Director. It's also read as Chloé Zhao's triumphant return to form after Eternals.
What’s debated
The fight is over its tears: devastating masterpiece or expertly engineered prestige grief-bait — is all that sobbing earned, or extracted?
Its footprint
It became 2025's shorthand for 'the movie that destroys audiences' — festival dispatches about entire theaters audibly weeping turned 'bring tissues to Hamnet' into a running joke, and 'did you cry?' into the default first question about it.
Where it stands
Too new to be canon but already a Letterboxd fixture — the five-stars-through-tears film of its year, and the movie that restored Zhao's post-Nomadland standing.
Did you know? Zhao borrowed more than inspiration from The Zone of Interest — she asked Jonathan Glazer's permission to 'steal the language' of his detached overhead shots, then hired his Oscar-winning cinematographer Łukasz Żal and sound designer Johnnie Burn for Hamnet.
Named by the director
- Happy Together (1997) — Zhao rewatches Wong Kar-wai's film as a ritual before every shoot, Hamnet included, and bonded with novelist Maggie O'Farrell over their shared devotion to him.
- The Zone of Interest (2023) — Zhao said she asked Glazer if she could 'steal the language' of his static, watching-from-above camera for Hamnet's domestic interiors.
- Terrence Malick — Zhao has repeatedly named Malick as a mentor and guiding influence on her nature-immersed filmmaking, a debt she continued to cite around Hamnet.