HAMNET
- Lysandra DL
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
HAMNET
Directed by Chloé Zhao
“Carrying Absence”
By Lyssandra DL
“Some pains never heal. You simply learn to accept them.”
The Crack
Hamnet falls ill one summer morning. The fever rises. His body burns. Agnes lays her hands on his forehead, searches through plants, through the gestures of the old ways, through everything she knows about life and death. Nothing works. The eleven-year-old boy slips away—slowly, inexorably. He leaves behind a void that will never close.
The film begins after the death. It refuses the spectacle of agony. It turns instead to what comes next: the silence that moves in, the house that resonates differently, the daily routines that lose their meaning. Agnes wakes and looks for Hamnet. Every morning, for weeks, she forgets for a second that he is gone. Then she remembers. The violence returns—again and again, without end.
Chloé Zhao films this repetition with a delicate touch, infused with heightened sensitivity. Days follow days. Agnes walks the fields. She touches the plants. She prepares meals. She keeps living because the world keeps turning. Yet something in her has gone dark. Her gestures now carry absence. Every movement becomes an inextinguishable memory. Every silence becomes the presence of her vanished child.
Two Ways of Carrying
William is in London when his son dies. He returns for the burial. He looks at Agnes. He sees her pain. He doesn’t know how to reach it. Words fail him—so he leaves again. He goes back to the theatre. He writes. He turns loss into language. He tries to give shape to what has none.
Agnes stays. She carries mourning in her body, in her soul. She carries it in the hands that touch the earth, in the way she looks at Judith—Hamnet’s twin sister—this living child who constantly recalls the one who is missing. Agnes feels the weight of absence the way one feels a child’s presence. She keeps her son pressed to her. She will never set him down.
The film shows this asymmetry without judgment. William runs because he cannot breathe. Agnes remains because she refuses to let go. Neither is wrong. They survive differently. They still love—yet from a distance. Hamnet’s death cuts a trench between them, a trench that deepens in an abyssal silence.
The camera watches Agnes with infinite attention: her restraint, her lost gazes, her trembling hands. It watches this woman who continues despite everything. Agnes bakes bread, tends the animals, cares for Judith—yet each gesture bears the weight of the one who is missing.
What Writing Cannot Repair
Years pass. William writes a play. He calls it Hamlet—his name. So close to Hamnet that no one can mistake the echo. The play speaks of a dead son, an absent father, ghosts that return. It speaks of what can only be said this way.
Agnes goes to see it. She sits in the audience. She listens to William’s words. She recognizes their son in those lines. She sees how William has turned Hamnet into a Danish prince. She understands this is his way of carrying absence. But she also understands that writing brings no one back.
The film asks, with gentle relentlessness: what does art do in the face of death? William believes writing gives meaning. He believes turning pain into a work can lift it beyond itself. But Agnes knows something else: Hamnet will remain dead. Words, however beautiful, will not make him return. Creation may console—but it repairs nothing.
That lucidity runs through the entire film. The director refuses to make art a cure. She shows writing as a survival gesture, a way of continuing. And she shows, too, that this gesture leaves the loss untouched. William writes Hamlet. Agnes carries Hamnet. Two paths that will never fully meet again.
The Twin
Judith grows up in the shadow of her dead brother. She resembles Hamnet: the same eyes, the same smile. Agnes looks at her and constantly sees the one who is missing. The resemblance becomes a weight. Judith feels she must exist for two. She feels she is carrying something that was never hers.
The film expresses this invisible burden with remarkable precision. Judith doesn’t speak much. She observes. She tries to understand why her mother looks at her with such sadness. She tries to be present without disappearing. She tries to exist fully, while everyone searches her face for her brother’s.
Agnes eventually understands. She sees what she is doing to Judith—how her own grief is suffocating her living child. So she tries to return. She tries to look at Judith for who she is. It takes time. It demands an immense effort. But Agnes loves her daughter. She refuses to lose her too.
Earth as Memory
This woman—this mother—lives close to nature. She knows plants, seasons, cycles. She knows everything dies, and everything returns in another form. That wisdom both helps her and tortures her. It helps, because it reminds her death belongs to life. It tortures, because it offers no comfort.
Chloé Zhao films the English countryside with a soothing beauty. Fields ripple under wind. Trees shift their colours. Rivers keep flowing. Indifferent nature continues its motion. Agnes walks through that landscape. She touches the grass. She feels rain on her skin. She searches for Hamnet in the elements.
The director suggests that this woman’s grief passes through body and earth. Agnes does not seek Hamnet in words or even in memory. She seeks him in the physical sensation of the world: in the heat of sun, the bite of winter, the scent of the plants she gathers. This way of carrying absence anchors the film in a fragile, tangible materiality.
What Remains
Hamnet ends without resolution. Agnes still carries absence. William keeps writing. Judith grows quietly in that shade. The film refuses to turn grief into a neat, theatrical “stage.” It shows that some losses are never overcome. You simply learn to live with them.
That honesty makes the story devastating. It respects pain. It refuses to minimize it or romanticize it. It shows that losing a child fractures existence forever. That fracture becomes part of you. Sometimes it falls silent. Often it screams. It never disappears.
Hamnet honours Agnes. It honours all mothers who carry the absence of a child— their dignity, their strength, their ability to continue. It shows that this ability doesn’t come from spectacular heroism. It comes from a stubborn love that refuses to abandon the living.
William, for his part, finds refuge in writing. Hamlet becomes his monument to Hamnet—his way of saying: you existed. You still matter. I carry you in my words. The attempt moves us. Yet the film gently reminds us that words remain words. They console the one who writes them. They move those who read them. But they bring no one back.
A Universal Story
Hamnet speaks of a sixteenth-century family, but it speaks to every parent who has lost a child. It speaks to every way of carrying absence. It speaks to all those who try to turn pain into something bearable.
It becomes a mirror—reflecting each of us back to our own losses, our own ways of surviving, those absences we carry without ever quite knowing how. It reminds us grief has no manual. Each person moves forward as they can.
Chloé Zhao films this truth with total empathy. She judges no one. She understands Agnes who stays. She understands William who runs. She understands Judith who grows up anyway. She grants each one their dignity. She shows that surviving the loss of a child demands a silent courage—daily, invisible, uncelebrated.
Hamnet leaves a mark: a soft, tearing trace. A memory of what it is to keep living when a part of you has died. The film heals nothing. It accompanies. It rests a hand on the shoulder of those who carry absence and whispers: you are not alone.
“You don’t recover from certain losses. You simply learn how to breathe around them.”
In theatres since January 21, 2026 | 2h 05min | Drama
