Make It Grief: Hamnet, Train Dreams, and the Prestige of Loss

Placed side by side, these films illuminate two competing models of prestige naturalism. One builds solemnity through cultural capital, symbol-heavy nature, and affective devices that arrive pre-loaded with meaning. In that model, the suffering body becomes emblem, the emblem becomes argument, and “depth” is secured by association. The other builds feeling through time, labor, sensory accumulation, and the small erosions that gather into an existential recognition: survival is a form of witnessing, and witnessing rarely becomes record.

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1. Make It Grief

A striking feature of contemporary prestige cinema is its confidence that grief can function as seriousness insurance. Place a dead child, a broken household, a solitary survivor at the center of the frame, and profundity is assumed by default. Naturalistic textures, forests, weathered faces, tactile labor, unglamorous interiors, arrive as visual corroboration, as if the world’s rough surfaces could certify a work’s depth. Yet grief is not an automatic engine of meaning. Its universality makes it easy to instrumentalize, and a dead child lets a film borrow emotion in advance, leaning on cues that arrive pre-authorized to move us. This is the temptation these two adaptations test.

Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025), adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, stages the death of Shakespeare’s son as a domestic catastrophe that is gradually pulled toward the public monument of the play, culminating in the Globe sequence where private grief is asked to become collective ritual. Train Dreams (Clint Bentley, 2025), adapted from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella and released into the attention economy of streaming, follows Robert Grainier across decades of labor and dispossession, treating the loss of a family as one rupture inside a larger regime of impermanence. Reading them side by side clarifies two competing ways prestige naturalism earns depth: by smoothing the passage of grief into cultural permanence, or by insisting on the dignity of lives that leave no record, even when that dignity depends on its own forms of purification.

They sit close enough to invite comparison. Both are literary adaptations, both treat “nature” as a primary palette, and both traffic in solitude and loss. Their divergence emerges in where they locate gravity. Zhao’s film organizes grief around the aura of an exemplary name and a monumental artwork, shaping loss into an origin story for cultural permanence. Bentley’s film, by contrast, establishes impermanence as the governing condition of a world that erases itself, where jobs, landscapes, and social memory disappear with the same quiet inevitability as individual lives. One wager leans on recognition, while the other leans on duration and a patient attention to the ordinary.

2. Hamnet and the Authorial Alibi

If Hamnet advertises itself as a revisionary story, it does so through Agnes. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel and co-written for the screen by Zhao and O’Farrell, the film moves the center of gravity away from the playwright-as-genius and toward the wife, the mother, the figure who remains in Stratford while her husband circulates through London’s public life. Tellingly, the novel never names Shakespeare, and the film keeps that silence almost to the end.

The film’s most compelling material belongs to this choice. Jessie Buckley portrays Agnes with a tactile, almost animal attunement to her surroundings, capable of a rage that erupts as a visceral refusal of the world’s terms. Even when the script leans into “elemental woman” iconography, Buckley keeps the performance unstable and human, pushing back against the film’s impulse to sanctify her through a quasi-witch aura, a faintly Lilithian guise that risks flattening the character into a decorative, occultist archetype. Yet again and again, the film hands its authority back to Shakespeare. The name is withheld, but recognition does the work: the theater, the quotations, the movement toward Hamlet all return the domestic story to the canonical figure it tries to displace. Agnes’s grief becomes the very thing that must be translated, converted, and ultimately “redeemed” through the author-function. The narrative’s central maneuver is the transformation of domestic catastrophe into cultural destiny, mourning as the hidden engine of artistic endurance. This is the familiar modern myth of creativity as private wound, later ennobled as the singular source of form.

It would be no real objection merely to say that the film converts grief into art; that conversion is openly its subject, since Hamnet presents itself as the story of the loss that becomes the play, and the tragic tradition it joins has always made sorrow into form. The objection lies one level down, in the manner of the conversion. Tragedy earns the passage from grief to art by keeping the contradiction alive inside the work, but Hamnet settles it in advance. It binds cause to effect as though a dead son were the legible origin of a masterpiece.

Agnes may be the film’s sensorial focal point, but the film’s authority keeps moving away from her, toward the monument waiting to receive her loss. The figure of Hamnet intensifies this problem. Jacobi Jupe’s performance is quietly affecting, especially in the child’s oscillation between play and solemn intuition. The young actor gives Hamnet a fragile interiority in the brief spaces the film allows him, and his death is staged as both intimate and theatrical. The difficulty is that Hamnet’s subjectivity is frequently routed into preordained emblem and the child recruited as a necessary sacrificial hinge. Grief needs to “mean”, so the child becomes an instrument that accelerates the myth, the death that must generate the masterpiece.

This is where Hamnet, the film, risks approaching what detractors call “grief porn”, because it treats suffering as a commodity whose value rises when attached to a monumental brand. The film’s “inspiration” passages frequently function like prestige-biopic beats. Lines and motifs arrive as icons to be lifted into the scene, winks arranged to trigger recognition. Rather than dramatizing how language is forged inside a mesh of contradiction, appetite, and social life, the film presents language as a relic with built-in gravitas. The canon does the work that character-building usually must. And once grief is asked to certify cultural destiny, Shakespeare must be simplified into something that can function as a stable emblem. Then, the drama begins to resemble the least demanding kind of biopic structure: suffering, then epiphany, then masterpiece, then redemption. Even when performed with conviction, this structure externalizes the work of investment. It assumes the audience will fill in the gaps because the name and the canon already exist.

By centering the narrative on a sanitized, contemplative, and chastened Shakespeare, the film narrows the horizon of human contradiction. The Shakespeare that survives most vividly in the plays is a creature of appetite and tonal instability where comedy bleeds into cruelty, erotic wit beside metaphysical dread, satire tucked into tragedy. Hamnet, by contrast, prefers a poet calibrated for edification, a figure whose affect can be consumed without friction, and domesticates Shakespeare into a mourner-saint, a purified vessel for the film’s redemptive myth. The grieving artist becomes a culturally respectable conductor for a profundity that the script itself struggles to generate.

3. Seriousness Insurance

The film’s bid for solemnity is most evident in its reliance on visual tropes designed to secure a tone of elevation. Agnes is often framed through these markers, her internal life mediated by symbols that function as semiotic shorthand for a wild sensibility. Her hawk is deployed as an emblem of solitary freedom and untamed nobility. A dark cavity at the foot of a forest tree recurs as a literalized void, a heavy-handed omen of the coming tragedy. And finally, the veil draped over Hamnet after his death serves as an overused image of separation, a membrane the film can show us, so that metaphysical distance becomes an object.

These motifs can be striking as composition. The trouble is their predictability as seriousness insurance. Under this pressure, grief becomes spectacle and intensity becomes the film’s proof of depth.

The film’s most productive device runs the other way. The quasi-witch iconography is the decorative form of a real knowledge; it turns the healer’s craft into an aura of the uncanny, threatening to flatten practice into emblem. Yet the craft is genuine. Agnes’s everyday attentiveness to plants and bodies, herbal practice, garden work, the patient handling of living things, gives her care a density the iconography tends to obscure. And that craft is also what undoes her. It pivots from competence to powerlessness, from intimacy to guilt; for all her resources, she remains powerless against her child’s mortality. In those moments, Buckley’s performance finds genuine friction, as grief registers as humiliation, as failed stewardship, and as bodily knowledge turned against itself.

That local precision, however, only sharpens the film’s larger weakness. Having discovered a concrete source of psychological pressure, the screenplay repeatedly retreats into elevated iconography and pre-loaded cues, as if it distrusted the harsher, more ordinary truth its own premise had already provided.

That retreat also depends on a major adaptational reduction. To sustain the image of “Hamlet” as a direct vessel for the father’s grief over his son, the film must systematically purge the play’s most intricate and abrasive features. The prince’s potential madness, his misogyny, and the metaphysical ambiguity of the Ghost (who may well be a deceptive demon rather than a mourning father) are flattened into a legible, therapeutic homage. The film treats the play as a relic of personal history, disregarding the tonal instability. By forcing this one-to-one correlation, the narrative abdicates the difficulty of Shakespearean genius in favor of a sanitizing, redemptive arc.

This is also where the film’s idea of inspiration becomes too impoverished for the work it invokes. Hamlet is powerful because grief enters a contaminated dramatic system and becomes inseparable from delay, theatricality, cruelty, erotic disgust, metaphysical doubt, political rot, and the possibility that mourning itself may be manipulated by false voices. The play drives bereavement into instability. If Hamnet wanted to imagine the death of the son as one pressure among the pressures that made Hamlet possible, it would need to show grief entering language as disturbance, not as explanation. Instead, the film treats the play as if it were the clarified afterlife of a private wound.

None of this negates Buckley’s achievement. On the contrary, her performance brings into view a strand of the film that is genuinely intimate and that often reveals the film’s most persuasive alternative to its own mythology. Hamnet does stage the possibility that mourning can be shared inside a marriage. As Agnes watches the premiere of “Hamlet”, the narrative finally acknowledges a dimension of shared grief, as she realizes that the loss has not remained hers alone, and that her husband has been carrying it too, in his own compromised idiom.

For a moment, the film suggests the “masterpiece” is a bridge between two private silences, a space where Agnes is no longer alone because she is finally understood. However, the film is not content with this domestic reconciliation. It feels a structural need to “convert” this private realization into a public event, moving from the shared grief of the couple to a collective choreography of consolation.

Choreography that is made explicit in the film’s most famous sequence. Agnes, standing out in the crowd, reaches her hand toward the dead Hamlet on stage. A gesture of catharsis captured from a high-angle shot that emphasizes her isolation. Yet, in a move that betrays the film’s naturalistic pretension, the narrative suddenly homogenizes this private act. One by one, the other members of the audience follow suit, extending their hands in a collective gesture of consolation. The scene evokes a quintessential trope of 20th-century American cinema, the “slow clap” moment where the protagonist, after a period of alienation, is finally understood and vindicated by a standing, applauding consensus. By making the entire Globe Theatre participate in Agnes’s specific, domestic pain, the film translates a private tragedy into a pedagogical spectacle of universal empathy.

Agnes’s grief, as poignantly shown in Buckley’s performance, is sorrowful, humiliating, isolating, and politically constrained; yet the film’s structure keeps insisting on conversion. The private wound must be made legible as the hidden necessity of a canonical artifact. Her mourning becomes a corridor leading toward “Hamlet”, and the corridor is lined with symbols and cues that tell us, at every step, that we are in the presence of something “important”. This strategy culminates in the use of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight”, the ultimate “cheat code” for contemporary cinematic sadness.

Accounts from Buckley and Richter make that dependence literal. Buckley sent Zhao the track in the final days of shooting, it helped Zhao reimagine the ending, and it was played on repeat on set at the Globe to “set the mood.”1  Richter later composed a new cue for the finale, but Zhao kept the older piece anyway. This reliance on a “temp track” crystallizes the film’s dependence on pre-loaded affect. The issue is not Max Richter’s craft (a sensible match for Zhao’s atmospheric naturalism) but the film’s surrender to a culturally overdetermined shorthand. By now, that composition has become a recognized cinematic signal for loss, a shorthand that arrives with its own memory of prior scenes in other works. By deploying it, the film partially abdicates the responsibility of building its own emotional crescendo.

That is why the moment can feel like a cliché even to viewers predisposed to be moved. The strings arrive with an instruction embedded in cultural repetition: this is where you cry. While cinema is an art of guidance, the guidance here becomes coercive because it preempts the viewer’s own emotional discovery. The result is an economy of borrowed authority. Shakespeare authorizes the story, the canon authorizes the conversion of grief into art, and an overfamiliar musical emblem authorizes the catharsis.

4. Train Dreams and the Dignity of the Vanishing Life

Adapted from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Train Dreams begins from a different premise about what gives a life weight. It does not require a monumental name to authorize feeling. The film’s wager is that ordinary existence, when attended to with seriousness, contains its own metaphysical force. In Bentley’s rendering, the most devastating register is impermanence. Landscapes disappear, work cultures mutate, social memory fails, and the individual survives long enough to feel the world slipping out from under his own biography. The wager is real, and for long stretches the film honors it, though the dignity it earns rests, too, on something the adaptation quietly takes out of Grainier’s past.

Grief remains central, but it is not sealed inside a single catastrophe. The protagonist’s losses matter, and the film does not trivialize them, yet it frames them within a slower, more encompassing erosion, the world changes faster than the self can metabolize, and the person becomes a remnant.

Bentley’s direction supports this by letting landscape function as more than prepackaged metaphor for purity or a high realm. The forest carries historical violence quietly. It is a working environment, a scale of time, an acoustic space, and often a blunt witness. The film’s visual metaphors are direct and, because they are direct, they land. A boot nailed to a tree serves as an improvised gravestone for anonymous laborers, eventually besieged by moss. That moss returns again at film’s final image, where the protagonist’s own deathbed is shown similarly overtaken. It is a silent rhyme about silence, suggesting that Grainier’s life has not ended in tragedy, but has been quietly reabsorbed into the continuity of matter, nature’s slow way of writing over what human beings fail to witness.

The film’s most precise social note is struck when Grainier returns to logging late in life. The humiliation is quiet, the tempo has changed, the tools and rituals have changed, the jokes and cruelties circulate in a language that excludes him. People who once knew him cannot place him, and the absence of recognition lands as an intimate wound. Grainier’s aging becomes a kind of exile, and what might have been rendered as an “emotional moment” is instead treated as a small fact, therefore more credible, therefore more painful.

Technically, this restraint is anchored by Joel Edgerton’s performance, a study in withheld emphasis. The body becomes a record of labor and weather, the face registers decades through micro-adjustments. Edgerton’s Grainier feels like someone whose interior life has been trained into quiet. This is supported by a score that avoids manipulative omnipresence, acting as a minimalist texture that yields the foreground to the sound design, in which the organic noise of labor and the forest composes the true emotional atmosphere.

5. Malick’s Shadow and Streaming-Era Legibility

Despite its virtues, Train Dreams struggles with the gravitational pull of Terrence Malick’s late style and its debt is too heavy to ignore. Bentley adopts the whisper-cadence, the spiritualized voice-over, the drifting address to time, with such fidelity that the influence occasionally tips into mannerism. Influence can be productive, but redundancy is a formal failure. At several points, the narration verbalizes what Adolpho Veloso’s photography has already expressed, draining the space for ambiguity that contemplation might have opened.

This explanatory excess speaks to a contemporary anxiety of attention within the streaming era that seems to distrust the viewer, as if ambiguity always required an emotional caption. In an environment where images compete with constant distraction, the voice-over functions as a way of smoothing ellipses and making time legible for an infamously “distracted audience.” The cost is the displacement of discovery. The viewer is given not only the pathos, but the key to it, and the key arrives too quickly.

Still, even when the Malickian template shows through too clearly, Train Dreams preserves a fundamental sincerity that distinguishes it from Zhao’s project. It does not insist on transcendence as guarantee. It allows disappearance to remain disappearance, without compensating myth, without the promise that art will redeem loss by turning it into monument. Spoken only once, the line that crystallizes this ethic nonetheless echoes through the film as a guiding motif: “the world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit”. The world’s moral order depends on lives that do not become public speech.

A harder objection presses on Train Dreams too, and it touches the innocence the film seems to offer. In Johnson’s novella, Grainier’s first act is a crime. He joins the men trying to throw a Chinese laborer off the half-built trestle, and holds on when the others lose their nerve. The man escapes, and the guilt shadows Grainier for the rest of his life. Bentley cuts the crime. Here Grainier only looks on, sawing his tie, asking weakly “What did he do?” as company men do the killing. A perpetrator has become a troubled witness. That alteration lightens the moral weather around Grainier and the film that refuses to redeem loss cannot, in the end, fully resist redeeming its hero. In Johnson, the ordinary life that later claims our sympathy is already contaminated by racial violence, labor violence, and the easy cruelty of men absorbed into an economic machine. The novella does not let Grainier’s marginality purify him. Bentley’s film, by contrast, makes his solitude more purely elegiac. Grainier is marked by history, but less guilty before it.

This is the film’s deepest compromise. If Hamnet purifies Shakespeare so grief can become monument, Train Dreams purifies Grainier so disappearance can carry dignity without too much moral disturbance. The symmetry is worth noting. Zhao’s film borrows gravity from the canon and from the collective theater of consolation. Bentley’s borrows from Malickian lyricism and from a softened innocence that makes vanishing easier to mourn. But the two compromises are not equivalent, because they fail on different axes. Train Dreams is dishonest about complicity, it lifts the crime from Grainier’s hands and leaves him a witness, lightening the moral weather around a life it wants us to mourn. Hamnet is dishonest about loss itself, since its whole structure is a machine for redeeming grief. The first dishonesty is local, a choice about one man’s past; the second is constitutive, the organizing principle of the form. In this sense, Train Dreams keeps the more honest relation to loss. It lets disappearance remain uncompensated, where Hamnet cannot let grief rest until it has been redeemed.

6. Monuments and Moss

Placed side by side, these films illuminate two competing models of prestige naturalism. One builds solemnity through cultural capital, symbol-heavy nature, and affective devices that arrive pre-loaded with meaning. In that model, the suffering body becomes emblem, the emblem becomes argument, and “depth” is secured by association. The other builds feeling through time, labor, sensory accumulation, and the small erosions that gather into an existential recognition: survival is a form of witnessing, and witnessing rarely becomes record.

This difference matters beyond matters of taste; it is a question of how cinema justifies its own gravity. When prestige cinema leans on monuments, it risks converting the raw process of feeling into a pre-packaged certainty. In this model, grief is authorized in advance, sanctified by the weight of names, symbols, and a borrowed cultural lineage that ensures the pain is never useless. But when a film risks giving full weight to a life that leaves no record, it must abandon that borrowed safety. It asks us to witness a disappearance that offers no legacy.

In the end, Hamnet persuades us that grief becomes art and art redeems grief. Train Dreams advances a less consoling (and, in its best moments, truer) proposition: grief is one name for the experience of impermanence, and impermanence equalizes everything, empires and hermits, monuments and moss. The disappearance of an ordinary man carries the same elegiac weight as the fall of a kingdom, for the final, shared destiny of everything human is oblivion.

Filmography

Hamnet (2025). Directed by Chloé Zhao. Screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell. Adapted from the novel Hamnet (2020) by Maggie O’Farrell.

Train Dreams (2025). Directed by Clint Bentley. Screenplay by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar. Adapted from the novella Train Dreams (2011) by Denis Johnson.

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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.