I don’t cry in films. I don’t cry, full stop. If you know me, you know this. I’m emotionally available in theory, composed in practice. Hamnet dismantled that reputation in under two hours.
The credits rolled and no one moved. Not in a polite, British let’s wait for the aisle to clear way — but in a stunned, bodily incapable way. I was crying uncontrollably, the kind that bypasses dignity altogether. I stood up and said, far too loudly, “Bloody hell, that was traumatising.” Then, instinctively — because humour is how I metabolise pain — “No wonder they’ve got awards coming out of their arses.”
This is a book turned film, and that matters. Hamnet was written by a woman, adapted by women, and directed by a woman — Chloé Zhao — and you can feel that lineage in every frame. So here’s the question: would this story of maternal grief look like this if it hadn’t passed through female hands at every stage? Would it be this unflinching, this bodily, this uninterested in neat resolution?
At its core, Hamnet is about a mother losing a child. But even that feels like a reduction. This isn’t grief with a narrative arc or a lesson wrapped up for the audience. There is no healing montage. No redemption. Just the reality that when a child dies, love doesn’t disappear — it suddenly has nowhere to go. No body to land on. No place to rest.
It sits in the body. It leaks into everything. It never resolves because it can’t.
One of the most shocking moments is the sound of grief itself: a guttural, animal scream from a woman who has just lost her child — raw, involuntary, almost feral. And then, almost immediately, she tries to pull herself back together. To compose herself. To return to something recognisable. Isn’t that the point? The scream is allowed, briefly. The recovery is expected immediately.
This is where the film is devastatingly precise. Grief isn’t aestheticised or softened. It alters posture, breath, silence. It rearranges relationships. It makes the world feel fundamentally unsafe. Love doesn’t cushion the loss — it sharpens it.
