REVIEW: During this year’s TIFF, two films depicted theatre as a vessel for transcendence

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/By Liam Donovan / Oct 29, 2025

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Spoiler alert: This article involves description of Kokuho and Hamnet‘s final scenes.

The 50th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) featured a bounty of films with links to the world of theatre. Adaptation-wise, there was a South Asian-led contemporary Hamlet, a sapphic mid-century Hedda Gabler, as well as a take on Bernard-Marie Koltès from French auteur Claire Denis. Toronto theatre history even took the spotlight in You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (In a Canadian Kind of Way), a documentary about the oft-discussed, star-stacked 1972 production at the Royal Alexandra Theatre.

But of the performing arts-adjacent selections I viewed, most affecting were two dramas: Lee Sang-il’s Kokuho and Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. In both period pieces, theatre creation serves as an emotional outlet for an artist navigating devastating loss. Sang-il and Zhao capture the stage’s power to offer transcendence for actor and audience, while underlining the danger of letting it consume you.

This year’s Japanese entry for best international feature at the Oscars, Kokuho begins in 1964 Nagasaki, where on a peaceful winter’s night, a 14-year-old boy named Kikuo (Sōya Kurokawa) watches his father — a high-ranking member of the yakuza (the Japanese mafia) — get shot to death. The orphaned Kikuo finds refuge with a family of kabuki practitioners, who train him to perform in the centuries-old performance tradition next to their similarly aged son, Shunsuke (Keitatsu Koshiyama). Kikuo then spends decades working to become the greatest kabuki performer in Japan. (After they mature into adulthood, Kikuo is played by Ryo Yoshizawa and Shunsuke by Ryusei Yokohama.)

In the TIFF People’s Choice Award-winning Hamnet, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s elegant 2020 novel, the titular son of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) dies at the age of 11, inspiring a four-hour play that’s become pretty famous. (Opening captions explain that the names “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were interchangeable in Elizabethan England.) While William’s off in London, his two other children and wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) remain at home in Stratford, where O’Farrell and Zhao’s screenplay primarily trains its eye.

Kikuo and William escape into the grind of theatre creation. This demands self-sacrifice. Kukuho’s Hanai Hanjiro II, the father of Shunsuke, trains the kabuki novices abusively, but Kikuo pushes through the pain. He later adopts Hanai’s destructive methods into his work, in one scene forcing Shunsuke into an intense, improvised sequence of stage action that goes beyond reasonable physical limits.

William, too, works unflaggingly: After Hamnet dies, he’s unable to take even 24 hours off. Yet during the only scene set at Hamlet rehearsal, William’s mind seems to be half at home. As the actors playing Ophelia and Hamlet work through dialogue, cinematographer Łukasz Żal keeps his eye on William. The playwright paces back and forth, growing increasingly frustrated that the performers aren’t finding the right emotional register. He demands Hamlet repeat his lines, then repeat his lines, then repeat his lines, until suddenly William is hoarse with emotion, yelling the iambic pentameter back at the actors. (Of a similar spirit, but too obvious, is a moonlit sequence in which William mumbles the “to be or not to be” speech while staring down at the Thames.)

These obsessive tendencies send shrapnel flying in every direction. Kabuki is traditionally a family business, but Kikuo’s work ethic leads him toward following in Hanai’s path as the troupe’s next great star — an usurpation of Shunksuke that devastates much of the family. And while William’s success allows him to buy his family impressive gifts, including the largest house in Stratford, Zhao gives space to Agnes’ icy reactions, foregrounding her discontent over his absence from domestic life.

By focusing primarily on the artist, Kukuho makes Kikuo’s decision to dedicate himself to kabuki immediately understandable. It’s clear that before the arrival of the opportunity to perform, he has nothing — so why wouldn’t he do anything to hold onto this lifebuoy called kabuki? But we eventually learn more about the damage Kikuo has wrought, complicating the ethical stakes.

Most of Hamnet gives prime place to the negative effects of William’s actions, but when Agnes eventually makes the trip to London to see Hamlet, the implication is that maybe William’s absence was worth it. Although Agnes enters the Globe Theatre with skepticism, the play gives her a powerful chance to reunite with her boy, or at least a young man with his name. (A glib takeaway: If you’re going to abandon your family to write a play, it better be as good as Hamlet.)

Like a sports movie ending with the championship game, it’s inevitable (and a little formulaic) that both films conclude with scenes of performance. In Kukuho, it’s the culmination of several kabuki sequences, whereas in Hamnet, it’s the sole formal production — though, before his son’s death, William loved to tell stories around the house, once even dressing up his children as the witches from Macbeth.

Perhaps in response to nature’s cruelty, the climactic creations of both artists forge artificial versions of the natural world. Performing a play called The Heron Maiden, Kukuo doesn’t just embody a bird, but dances under a stream of fake white snow, echoing the weather that accompanied his father’s shooting. And William, who met Agnes in a forest next to Stratford, hangs a painted tapestry of trees at the back of Hamlet’s set (despite the play usually taking place in a castle).

I found it incredibly resonant to watch these characters use art to move beyond their painful circumstances. The Heron Maiden’s poignancy arises from its abstract form, mostly built around movement and light. Kikuo is able to harness the simple, eternal power of a body on stage, and retreat from reality into metaphor. What’s striking about cinematographer Sofian El Fani’s treatment of this scene is that the audience remains a peripheral, anonymous mass. The film’s perspective is instead intensely personal; once, it even slips into first-person point-of-view, revealing that, like the camera, Kikuo isn’t watching the audience: He’s admiring the beauty of the falling snow.

But Hamlet almost becomes a community event. While William gets the catharsis of playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father — a moving inversion of the father-son duo’s real-life circumstances — Zhao highlights the groundlings. The play nearing its end, Agnes reaches a hand toward Hamlet, who kneels downstage among royal corpses. The surprised actor returns the gesture. Then, the heart-render: Many of the other groundlings also outstretch an arm. Hamnet’s death may have been William’s inspiration, but the embodied text takes on a more expansive power, becoming a vessel for the whole crowd to transcend their pain.

The 50th Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 4 to 14, 2025.

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