7 Movies Like Hamnet to Watch After You Cry

Hamnet wrecked me. Chloé Zhao’s 2025 adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel takes the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son and turns it into something so physically felt that you don’t just watch it, you ache through it. Jessie Buckley’s Agnes doesn’t grieve prettily. She howls. She claws at the walls of a house that’s become a tomb. And Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare is almost worse, because he’s the parent who wasn’t there. If you’re looking for movies like Hamnet that carry that same weight of period grief, literary loss, and raw emotional honesty, you’ve come to the right place.

The thing about Hamnet is that it operates on two frequencies. There’s the historical setting, the Elizabethan world of plague and muddy streets, but underneath that is a story about what happens to a marriage when the worst possible thing occurs. It’s not really a Shakespeare biopic. It’s a film about motherhood, absence, and the terrible bargain of turning pain into art. The films below all share some combination of those qualities: period settings, intimate grief, literary roots, or just the kind of quiet devastation that stays with you for days.

Not every film on this list will match Hamnet beat for beat, but each one earns its spot for at least one of the qualities that make Zhao’s film so hard to shake. Some lean into the period drama side. Others are about parental grief, artistic sacrifice, or relationships dissolving under pressure. All of them assume you’re okay with sitting in discomfort for a while.

1. Aftersun (2022)

This is the closest spiritual sibling to Hamnet on the entire list. Charlotte Wells’ debut is about a daughter rewatching camcorder footage of a holiday with her father, trying to understand who he really was. It’s a film built on gaps, the things unsaid between parent and child, and the grief of realizing you never fully knew someone you loved. Paul Mescal is in this one too, and he’s devastating in a completely different way than in Hamnet. Where Shakespeare was absent by choice, Calum is present but unreachable. There’s a scene where he stands on a hotel balcony at night, and you can feel the distance between him and his daughter even though she’s just inside. Aftersun is the kind of film that gets heavier the further away from it you get.

2. Nomadland (2021)

Chloé Zhao directed Nomadland before Hamnet, and you can feel the connective tissue between the two films. Frances McDormand’s Fern is grieving her husband and an entire way of life that vanished when the town she lived in literally ceased to exist. It’s not a period piece, but it has the same patient observation of loss, the same respect for silence, and the same insistence that grief isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a state of being. If you loved how Zhao shoots natural light in Hamnet, Nomadland is where she developed that instinct. The American West becomes a kind of emotional landscape here, vast and indifferent and somehow comforting for it.

3. The Favourite (2018)

A sharp left turn in tone, but hear me out. Yorgos Lanthimos’ period drama about Queen Anne is funny and vicious on the surface, but at its center is a woman in constant physical pain who suffered through seventeen pregnancies, most ending in loss. Olivia Colman’s Anne keeps rabbits as surrogates for the children she buried, and there’s a scene where she names them that hits different after watching Hamnet. The court scheming between Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone is delicious, but the real devastation is Anne’s loneliness: a queen surrounded by people who only want to use her. The Favourite and Hamnet also share a cast connection in Joe Alwyn, who appears in both.

4. The Theory of Everything (2014)

The Theory of Everything shares DNA with Hamnet in a specific way: it’s about a relationship between two people where one partner’s extraordinary mind comes at an extraordinary personal cost to the other. Felicity Jones plays Jane Hawking as someone who loves fiercely but is slowly consumed by the role of caretaker. Eddie Redmayne won the Oscar, sure, but Jones carries the film’s emotional truth. Like Agnes in Hamnet, Jane’s sacrifice is the one the world doesn’t write about. There’s a moment early on where she watches Stephen across a Cambridge lawn and you can already see her deciding to give her life to this person, not knowing what that will actually mean.

5. The Brutalist (2024)

Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour epic about a Hungarian-Jewish architect rebuilding his life in postwar America is a different kind of grief film. Adrien Brody’s László Tóth has survived the Holocaust, but survival isn’t the same as living. The film asks what it costs to make art when everything you had has been taken from you, which is exactly the question Hamnet asks of Shakespeare. Felicity Jones plays László’s wife Erzsébet, and she brings the same quiet endurance she brought to The Theory of Everything. Joe Alwyn also appears here, making it another thread connecting this list back to Hamnet. The Brutalist is long and deliberately paced, and some people will find it punishing. But if the artistic sacrifice theme in Hamnet resonated with you, this one goes even deeper into that wound.

6. Casa Grande (2026)

Casa Grande is a family drama about a prodigal daughter returning home to her father’s farm as he faces a terminal diagnosis and mounting pressure from competitors looking to take the land. It’s a smaller film without the literary pedigree of Hamnet, but it shares that sense of time running out, of old wounds resurfacing when a family is forced back together. The grief here is anticipatory rather than retrospective. You know what’s coming, and so does everyone on screen, and watching them navigate that knowledge is quietly brutal. It came out last month and deserves more attention than it’s getting.

7. Fatherland (2026)

Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland arrives on June 19 and is the one upcoming film on this list. Pawlikowski already proved with Cold War that he can make intimate period grief feel enormous in a compact runtime, and at just 82 minutes, Fatherland looks built along the same lines. Sandra Hüller and August Diehl lead the cast. I can’t speak to the finished film yet since it hasn’t been released, but given Pawlikowski’s track record for spare, emotionally devastating dramas about love and loss across historical divides, it belongs on the radar of anyone who connected with Hamnet’s emotional register. Watch this space.

The Art-and-Destruction Question

What connects so many of these films, and what makes Hamnet stick in your bones, is the question of whether great art justifies personal destruction. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet out of his son’s death. Is that transcendent or monstrous? Zhao doesn’t give you an easy answer. The Brutalist wrestles with the same dilemma from a different angle: László’s buildings are extraordinary, but the human cost of making them is staggering. Even Aftersun touches this, with Sophie turning her memories of her father into the very film we’re watching.

This tension between creation and loss runs through the best dramas in our collection. It’s the reason these films feel different from standard period pieces or literary adaptations. They aren’t interested in costumes and production design for their own sake. The historical settings serve a purpose: they strip away modern comforts and force characters to sit with their pain without the vocabulary we’d use today to process it.

If Hamnet left you gutted and you need something else to watch, start with Aftersun if you want intimacy, Nomadland if you want landscape and solitude, or The Favourite if you need some venom with your grief. For the question of what art costs the artist, The Brutalist is unsparing. For a quieter family story about impending loss, Casa Grande earns its place. The Theory of Everything will break your heart in a very familiar way if you felt for Agnes watching her husband choose his work over his family. And keep an eye on Fatherland later this month. They’ll all hurt. That’s the point.