TORONTO: Hamnet, a devastating period drama about the life of William Shakespeare and his family, won top prize on Sunday at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The heart-wrenching movie stars Paul Mescal as Shakespeare, who tries to forge a career as a playwright while his wife Agnes — played by Jessie Buckley — contends with the perils of plague and childbirth in Elizabethan England.

It comes from Chloe Zhao, who directed 2020’s Oscar-winning Nomadland. Securing the Toronto award, on top of glowing reviews, confirms Hamnet as another Academy Award frontrunner.

The film is based on a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, which colors in the gaps of the little we know about the Shakespeares. “Maggie’s novel, it was like a poem,” Zhao said. Novel and film speculate that Agnes encouraged William to move to London solo and pursue his dreams in the theater, confident that their love was strong enough to endure the separation.

“To see them fall in love and come together, be torn apart... it’s an inner civil war that we all battle with as we grow and mature,” said Zhao. The couple had a son called Hamnet — a name that scholars say would have sounded indistinguishable from Hamlet at the time the play was written.

Published in Dawn, September 15th, 2025