The opening and closing images of a film are rarely arbitrary. They are among the most concentrated sites of cinematic meaning.  The first image establishes a world, a rhythm, a vocabulary.  The final image returns us to that vocabulary and tells us how to understand what we have seen. If the opening scene proposes a way of seeing, the closing scene confirms, complicates, or transforms it. In this sense, the beginning and end of a film are not just bookends to the narrative, not just the ‘once upon a time’, and ‘happily ever after’, but often point to the film’s deepest thematic designs.

This is especially true of Hamnet. Its first and last sequences form a visual and emotional call-and-response, framing the film’s examination of grief, isolation and embodiment. In the opening ‘birth’ of Agnes in the forest, the camera moves slowly through the green canopy and branches before descending to her curled body on the forest floor, held within the roots of a tree, almost in a foetal position. She wakes, looks up into the light, hears the kestrel, and rises to meet it. The closing sequence, by contrast, takes place in The Theatre[1] (London) during a performance of Hamlet. Agnes stands in the crowd as the actor[2] playing Hamlet enacts his death. She reaches toward him; the audience around her does the same. The dying Hamlet extends himself toward the crowd and speaks the line, “the rest is silence.” Agnes watches through tears, and it is then that her private loss becomes something shared (with us), staged, and briefly communal. Death of a family member, for those who have experienced it, feels impossible for anyone else to relate to, yet in practice, it is those around us who can’t really understand who provide the stage for grief that would otherwise be unbounded and impossible to tame. I continue to find, as I get older and experience bereavement more often, that in my own culture, how powerful this is. 

What matters in Hamnet is not simply that these two scenes are different, but that they are related. The film begins in the forest and ends in the theatre against the painted background of the forest. As it begins in solitude, it ends in collectivity. There is a journey from the silence and instinct of the forest to that of language, performance, and public emotion. The movement from one to the other highlights the film’s theme that grief begins as an intensely private and as an almost incommunicable experience, but art gives it shape, ceremony, and social access.

The opening scene introduces Agnes not as a social being, nor as wife or mother, and not through dialogue. She is an elemental figure communing with nature. She is first seen within the earth, enclosed by roots, almost as though nature itself were holding her. The image has an unmistakably prenatal quality. Agnes appears not simply in the forest but of it. We learn later her deceased mother was referred to as a forest-witch. Here, she is sheltered by the tree, awakened by sunlight, calls (whistles) and is responsive to birdsong.  This montage establishes her as a figure of instinctive knowledge and attunement to her environment. Her relationship to the kestrel confirms this. The glove, the whistle, and the bird’s descent through the trees are gestures that define Agnes as being intimate with the natural world through a manner of knowing that precedes conversation and social life.

This is significant because Hamnet is a film about different aspects of grief. The forest opening not only establishes character, it establishes ontology. In David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film^[3], he determines that classical cinema narration is often “less invisible” at the beginning and the end of a film. This means that openings and endings are often the places where the film most clearly announces its design, framing, themes, and relation to us, the audience. 

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-37472055

[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14682761.2000.10807019

[3] https://www.routledge.com/Narration-in-the-Fiction-Film/Bordwell/p/book/9780415018777

Agnes belongs first to a world of touch, sound, rhythm, growth, and animal life. She is part of a living continuum. The roots around her body suggest both refuge and entanglement, protection, and confinement. They imply origin. She is held by something older and larger than herself.

The closing scene returns to these ideas, but in different form. At The Theatre, her grief is no longer floating between her body and environment. It has been translated into representation. Her debilitating pain has become drama. Hamlet’s death on stage is, for Agnes, both not her son and yet the performance is inseparable from him. The theatrical figure becomes a proxy, a substitute body through which Hamnet can be mourned. It is catharsis personified. (The film also invokes the idea that the actor playing Hamlet, too, has his own realisation of the transformative power of what is happening.) However, through the framing and cinematography the film makes clear that the significance of this moment is not only in substitution of Hamlet for Hamnet, but in substituting the personal for the collective. Agnes is no longer alone with sorrow. Around her, the audience is visibly moved. Their arms extend toward the dying figure. Emotion passes through the crowd. The balconies are full of witnesses. What had seemed unshareable becomes, if not fully communicable, then at least recognisable as a common human expression. Something that feels so impossibly personal becomes part of us all.

This is why the overhead shot of the crowd reaching forward is so powerful. It transforms spectatorship into embodied sympathy. The audience does not remain detached observers. Their outstretched arms make visible the desire to hold, help, or stay death itself. We, as the cinematic audience, feel that the gesture's emotional effect echoes the rooted embrace of the opening image. At the beginning, Agnes is cradled by the tree’s immense roots and at the end, Hamlet (Hamnet) is symbolically held by the massed human feeling of the crowd. One image is organic, the other theatrical, the first belongs to nature, the last to culture. In both shots, this is the site where our thought occurs. Vulnerability is met by an enclosing form. In each, the figure of isolation is placed within something larger than itself.

Hamlet’s famous last line, “the rest is silence,” acquires a particular force in this context. On stage, it marks the character’s death, an escape from mortal woes. In the context of Agnes’ experience, it gives a limit to her expression of grief. There is a point beyond which grief cannot be uttered. Yet the film places this line within a scene that is overflowing with image, music, gesture, and shared empathy. Silence, here, is not emptiness, a void of the afterlife. Silence is what remains after language has brought us to the edge of our structured (or unhinged) thoughts. Beyond that threshold, Chloé Zhao’s cinema takes over. We have the high-angle/bird’s-eye shot of reaching hands, Agnes’ face, the music, the imagined presence of Hamnet, and the fade to black.

Zhao's choice of frame and shot is telling. We have the close-up of Hamlet (the actor), and Will cut in between the overhead shots of the theatrical audience and Agnes. The overhead shot is somewhat birdlike or perhaps godlike, looking down on humanity and in tune with the opening image we had of Agnes. Alternatively, this could be our 21^st-century perspective peering into the past from above, being reminded that in our hyper-individual existences, we ultimately all need to hold each other. Just as Agnes realises she is not asleep in the roots of the earth, she is awake within a shared world, we are being told to wake up from our screens and selfies and reach out.

This is why opening and closing scenes matter so much. They are not just memorable images. They produce an ethically charged experience and argue for a specific perspective in visual form. In Hamnet, the opening scene proposes a world in which Agnes is aligned with nature and instinct, but is solitary. The closing sequence transforms this into collectivity. By the end, grief has moved from the body in the forest to the body in the crowd, from private feeling to public ritual (drama). The last image does not tell us that Agnes’ loss has been overcome. It suggests that loss becomes survivable when it is held by something beyond the self. This can be art, and the spectatorship of it, by collective feeling, or indeed as is implied by the stage ghosts and the apparition of Hamnet, by an afterlife through which the dead 'live on’ in image, sound, and story. Zhao’s lingering image of Agnes’ shifting emotions, at the point of closure of the film, is the beginning of the film's afterlife and the afterthoughts for us as we leave the theatre.

Agnes: The rest is silence