Hamnet

i'll be honest, i've had a weird relationship with chloe zhao's direction lately. when she signed on with a big production company for her last film, it felt like she was drifting from the quiet sensual hum I loved about her: the authenticity, sensuality, and human aspect that her best picture and one of my favorite films nomadland achieved. but hamnet.... this one redeemed everything for me. zhao's best films feel like conversations with the earth. hamnet is exactly like that: tender, grounded, and humanistic. she returns to this sacred relationship of people and land, letting nature breath through the dialogue and emotion expressed in this film. everything feels unforced, allowing a sense of sublime spirituality that flows in this film. i can't fully put into words how hard this movie wrecked me. luckily, i was sitting in the back row of the theater, sobbing heavily with tears running down my shirt (pretty much during the whole film). i had to sit through the entire credits just to collect  i also felt this sharp pain in my chest, it was subtle, but it was a gentle reminder that life is created from empathy, that every future we dream of grows out of the tenders that is rooted in the world we plant ourselves in. everyone in the audience was mourning, not just the characters on screen, but themselves. it felt like a reflection of the child we had lost within us, the part of us that felt the pressures of the world, forced to confine to them; as we learn what it means to raise a life while carrying the absence of our own. that what speaks so much about this film is how humanistic and universal it is as we all know the feeling of grief, it’s a connection that we all encounter traversing in life. this movie made me feel so paternal wanting to hold onto my future that is fragmented and on it's own becoming. hamnet made me feel this strange, fragile pull as if I was cradling a life still on it's way. what moved me so deeply was the way the film holds hamnet to himself. not as an idea, not as a symbol, but as a child who shapes the presence of the world after his absence. zhao showcases such a beautiful representation of what it means for parents to lose something they've nurtured, something that has called out upon them for protection. it's not a loud grief though, it's grief written on bones, carving into the embrace of what love leaves behind when it loses it's existence. finally, what struck me the most, and I've been pondering on this thought is the way nature becomes a memory in this film. how it holds on long, after we're gone. the hawk is a beautiful representation as it's life isn't just the physical presence of it to it's owner, but becoming a ceremony. even the motif of the rowan berries on the branch, symbolizing the memory of what we once knew, a memorial of life in the smallest forms. it's a way of not just keeping it in the hearts of the family, but in external world. when hamnet dies, wanting nothing more to be like his father, to be the man that he saw in himself as a boy, zhao let's that return to the stage. a boy stepping into the darkness through a cutout of painted trees, a small doorway into the memory of what becomes internal. even when the audience lays their hands on hamlet, who's helpless again in front of her mother, it's hamnet you feel. the child folding himself into nature, a return to where his mother felt the most free, where the family felt the most connected. it's as if nature becomes the place where he stays alive, where love continues even when the body is gone.