©Stedelijk Museum, Erwin Olaf 2026.
Tears and Transcendence: A Reflection on Hamnet
February 19, 2026. Written by Nur Koç.
Even the remembrance of Hamnet returns as a physical sensation, a tightening in the throat, a trembling somewhere between breath and silence. Hamnet does not remain a film, it becomes a trace in the body. My eyes filled with tears long before the halfway point, and the quiet collective sobbing in the theater felt less like an audience and more like a shared mourning. It was the emotional force shaped by Chloé Zhao and carried through the devastating and deeply embodied presence of Jesse Buckley, who stand as roots of this creation. This may be the only film I feel compelled to return to endlessly, not out of habit, but out of a deep, almost instinctive longing. I was mesmerized, suspended, disarmed. I could not comprehend how something so alive could exist only behind a screen, separated from the world I physically occupy. It was an emotional language that dissolved the boundary between observer and experience. It felt like loss. It felt as though everyone present had, in some quiet way, lost a child.
And yet, within this emotional weight lives an equally immense purity. In an era saturated with artificiality, immediacy, and emotional numbness, Hamnet emerges as something profoundly human, resisting the detachment of today. Despite its narrative being filled with life in its most fragile and vulnerable forms, it carries a sacred stillness. It offers comfort and a burst of emotion, but also devastation. My heart felt both shattered and expanded, broken open and filled at once. There was a quiet joy in surrendering to this transformation, in allowing something so honest to move freely through the body.
From the earliest scenes, there is life in its most elemental form. Love appears in flushed cheeks and luminous eyes. Birth unfolds not as spectacle but as earth itself, raw, grounded, sacred. The film, with its overwhelming emotional power, feels like an ode to cycles we have forgotten how to honor. It becomes an ancient portrayal of birth, not as spectacle, but as force. The distance between lovers, the silent ache of absence, the experience of belonging to two worlds at once, and the necessity of leaving one behind in order to reach another. The fierce and instinctive force of motherhood. The held breath in Judith’s suffering. A mother suspended between desperation and devotion, fighting not only for a life but against the loss itself. And a sibling bound to his sister through something deeper than blood, where soul leans toward soul, and the unbearable feeling of watching someone you love suffer. His fear flickers within him, fragile yet awake, and in that fragile space lays courage. In the innocence of his soul, love does not question, his presence becomes an offering, a sacrifice. The suspension of breath, the unbearable tension, and then grief arrives, not as a moment but as a landscape, leaving behind an irreversible void. Vast. Uninhabitable.
Two images remain carved into memory. The room of the children, once filled with symmetry and presence, becomes altered beyond repair. Two beds become one, absence becomes architecture. And then, the final scene within the theater. To witness the poetry of theater within cinema creates a layered emotional reality that is almost impossible to endure. The narrative, shaped with such sensitivity and emotional weight, makes witnessing this moment deeply painful. And yet within that unbearable space, there is something strangely satisfactory, perhaps more accurately described as recognition. Recognition of grief as an inseparable part of love. Recognition of art as a vessel that allows us to see, hold, and transform pain. Recognition of the quiet and fragile truth in witnessing pain become expression. The depth of human emotion, the unbearable magnitude of love, the silent strength of togetherness, and the presence of grief reveal themselves with immense wisdom.
What exists behind the film deepens its resonance even further, as it holds the shaping of its emotional landscape. The process itself feels like an extension of its spirit. Watching interviews and listening to the reflections of those involved, driven by a desire to understand the origin of the film and its emotional truth, slowly revealed the invisible threads that brought it into existence. Learning that Hamnet was portrayed by real life brothers, Noah Jupe and Jacobi Jupe, feels profoundly meaningful, as their real connection exists beneath the performance, reinforcing the film’s essence of family, shared breath, and invisible bonds that perhaps could not be recreated otherwise. Learning that after emotionally heavy scenes, the cast and crew would dance together reflects Zhao’s belief that emotion must move through the body in order to be released, that grief, like energy, must be allowed to transform. This understanding lives inside every frame.
The world itself feels born from an internal landscape before becoming physical. Nature is not decoration but presence. The earth exists in harmony with both beauty and terror, reflecting the vastness of existence itself. The compositions of Max Richter exist as emotional architecture rather than accompaniment. His soundscape feels pure, precise, and deeply intuitive. Choirs emerge like distant memories. Resonating chords create a present and almost meditative atmosphere. Sometimes the sound feels weightless, filled with light. Sometimes it descends into darkness, into low and unsettling frequencies that mirror the emotional gravity of the narrative. The compositions feel born from emotion itself, sounding like landscapes, skies, and emotional states. Sometimes they offer heaven, sometimes something closer to the unknown. The piece Of the Heart becomes the living heart of the film. Richter creates a beating pulse that sustains life, slowly weakening, dissolving into a buzzing silence. The absence of sound becomes the main force. Listening becomes an act of witnessing life fade.
The visual world shaped by Fiona Crombie reaches its peak in the final theatrical scene, where everything is designed with extraordinary sensitivity. The painted backdrop carries the presence of human touch and the weight of something eternal. Nothing feels accidental. For Zhao, color becomes language. Will exists in blue, elevated, intellectual, reaching upward. Agnes exists in red, visceral, rooted, the embodiment of earth and blood, the primal force of existence. Everything is shaped by cycles of energy and opposition, red and blue, sky and ground, masculine and feminine, mind and body, separation and union. This dialogue becomes the quiet center of the film.
And then there are the performances. Each actor dissolves into their role completely. Jesse Buckley delivers something almost unbearable in its truth. Her performance does not feel constructed, but lived. Her emotional presence emerges from somewhere deeply internal, beyond technique, beyond intention. It resonates directly with the heart and the body of the viewer, bypassing thought entirely. Paul Mescal carries the fragile transformation from love and presence into absence and helplessness with profound sensitivity, where every gesture speaks.
This film exists because of a rare convergence of artists who created not for spectacle, but for truth, for the essence of humankind. What they have given feels immeasurable. I left the theater both full and emptied. Laughing and broken. Alive and undone. I continue to relive it in fragments. Images return uninvited. My eyes still fill with tears at the thought of it. I still struggle, with a kind of pure joy, to comprehend how something so fragile and pure exists in the world.
To pause and consider what it takes to create something like this makes the mastery and devotion feel almost incomprehensible. It demands a delicate precision to craft such a living atmosphere, a family woven so the audience can feel its pulse within them. It requires the courage to turn inward, to translate the invisible into form. The tears that remain are not only for the tragedy witnessed, but for the awe of its creation.
This purity, this fragility, this sacred and sensual beauty feels inseparable from a deeply feminine force, and it is no surprise that it was shaped and brought into existence by women.
“This is what life is about. Seasons change. You have to have winter to appreciate spring.” - Chloé Zhao