Grief denied |
CHLOÉ Zhao’s Hamnet shows you what grief does to a body, to relationships, to the act of creation itself. The film is devastating not because it manipulates your emotions but because it sits with loss in a way that feels almost unbearable. Zhao films bereavement the way you experience it: as something that warps time, that makes the ordinary world feel impossible to navigate, that transforms everyone you love into strangers.
The film follows William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes after the death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet. But this isn’t a story about a famous writer finding inspiration in tragedy. It’s about two people trying to survive the unsurvivable. Agnes, a healer who couldn’t heal her own child, withdraws into a grief so large it threatens to swallow her. William, unable to process what he’s lost, buries himself in work, in performance, in the theatre that takes him away from the unbearable silence of home.
Hamnet was published in 2022 by Maggie O’Farrell to critical acclaim; it was my favourite read that year. She, along with Zhao, wrote the film. They understand that grief doesn’t just take something from you. It reshapes everything that remains. Love doesn’t disappear but it turns into resentment, blame, even the........