#chloe-zhao

#chloe-zhao

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.

In Venice, Telluride and Toronto, the red carpets have been rolled up and the dust has settled on the film festivals which traditionally function as Oscar launchpads. Back in Hollywood, publicists are recalibrating campaigns and pundits are placing their bets on the big films and performances of the upcoming awards season. A few key contenders are still yet to be seen, but at this stage of the race, one thing seems clear: come next March, records will be broken.

Maggie O'Farrell's lauded 2020 novel Hamnet is a dense and lyrical imagining of the lives of William Shakespeare's family, full of interior thought and lush descriptions of the physical world. It would seem, upon reading, near impossible to adapt into a film. Or, at least, a film worthy of O'Farrell's so finely woven sensory spell. Film-maker Chloe Zhao has attempted to do so anyway, and the result is a stately, occasionally lugubrious drama whose closing minutes are among the most poignant in recent memory.