Chloe Zhao’s adaptation is not an explanation of Shakespeare — it is a celebration of art itself

Hamnet and the 2026 Oscars: Why So Many Miss the Point

As the 98th Academy Awards approach on March 15, 2026, the Adapted Screenplay race has generated spirited debate — and more than a little confusion about what Hamnet, the film based on Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel, is actually trying to say. At its core, the debate exposes a recurring problem in how audiences and critics consume literary cinema: an insistence on literal meaning over poetic truth.

The Shallow Reading of Hamnet

The shallowest interpretation of the film, directed by Chloe Zhao and starring Jessie Buckley, is that it offers a tidy explanation of how Shakespeare got the idea for Hamlet. Some viewers have approached it expecting historical documentation. Scholars have long maintained that there is no hard evidence the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, directly inspired the famous play. But this argument misses the point entirely. The film is not a biography. It is not a documentary. It is a work of imagination rooted in grief, in the power of storytelling, and in what art can do when words fail us.

O’Farrell’s Source Material and the Art of Imagination

Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, upon which Zhao’s screenplay is co-credited, is among the most praised works of literary fiction of the past decade. O’Farrell was fascinated by something she noticed in Shakespeare’s work: despite the plague devastating Europe during his lifetime, killing thousands and reshaping society, Shakespeare almost never wrote about it directly. The novel uses that silence as an entry point, imagining how the death of a child — specifically Hamnet, who died in 1596 — might have become the emotional seedbed for some of the most enduring art in the English language. The novel never once names its lead male character as Shakespeare. It is not biography. It is transformation. You can explore O’Farrell’s work and understand why she has become one of Britain’s most respected literary voices.

Shakespeare in Love vs. Hamnet: Inspiration, Not Explanation

Critics who dismiss the film often cite Sir Ian McKellen’s reported skepticism. But as one film commentator noted, this is a “binary interpretation” of a work that operates on multiple levels simultaneously. Consider Shakespeare in Love (1998), which also imagined a fictional interior life for the playwright — but did so in comedy. Hamnet does it in tragedy. Both films are acts of artistic tribute, not historical assertion. They celebrate what it means to be a writer, to live inside a creative imagination so vast that personal catastrophe becomes the raw material for works that outlast centuries. Jessie Buckley’s performance as Agnes — Shakespeare’s wife — has been singled out by nearly every major awards tracker as one of the year’s finest. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is considering nominations in all major categories for the film.

The Adapted Screenplay Race: One Battle After Another vs. Hamnet

Awards watchers largely predict Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another — adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland — to win the Oscar for Adapted Screenplay. Gold Derby currently gives that film an 88.1% probability of winning the category. One Battle After Another has swept the WGA Scripter Award and Critics Choice nominations, creating what many describe as an unstoppable momentum. Hamnet has been nominated in Adapted Screenplay alongside Bugonia, Train Dreams, and Frankenstein, but most forecasters see it as a runner-up, not a winner, in that race. That does not diminish its achievement. It is rare for any film to achieve what Hamnet does on screen: to make grief universal, to make art feel necessary, to leave audiences shaken in ways that linger.

Why Hamnet Matters Beyond the Trophy Race

Perhaps the most honest thing to say about Hamnet is that it does not need to win an Oscar to vindicate itself. Films about grief and the creative imagination have always occupied a special space in cinema. Think of Terms of Endearment, or Ordinary People, or even Kramer vs. Kramer. These films endure not because they won awards — though many did — but because they told the truth about loss in ways that audiences recognized as their own. The Writers Guild of America holds adapted screenplay in high regard because it recognizes how difficult it is to take source material and transform it into something cinematic without betraying the original vision. O’Farrell’s novel presents a unique challenge: it is interior, lyrical, and almost entirely concerned with emotional states rather than plot mechanics. That Chloe Zhao and her co-writer managed to translate this onto screen at all is remarkable.

What the Debate Reveals About Audiences

The controversy around Hamnet ultimately reflects a broader tension in how we watch prestige films. There is an increasing tendency to filter everything through social or political meaning, to ask what a film says about power structures or representation, before asking what it feels. Hamnet asks audiences to feel first. It asks them to sit inside a grief so large it birthed one of the great plays in human history, and to recognize something of themselves in that grief. Whether it wins any Oscar on March 15 may be beside the point. The film has already done the work that matters. You can explore the Focus Features release for more information on the film. The screenplay race will resolve itself on Oscar night. But Hamnet’s place in the conversation about great literary adaptations seems secure regardless of outcome.