Chloé Zhao puts actors in real places under a low sun and lets the face do the work. It made her name on three small films. Since then: one handsome, tiring Marvel film, and one good grief film that tells you when to cry.
Fi1m perspective
The sun is going down. Someone stands in long grass, or on a beach, or at the edge of a forest, and the camera stays on them long enough that we stop waiting for anything to happen. That is a Chloé Zhao shot. It is in Eternals (2021), where immortals in dark uniforms with gold lines stand in a desert that looks like a desert and not a green screen, and it is in Hamnet (2025), where Jessie Buckley's Agnes goes barefoot in the woods and listens to something nobody else in the house can hear. Zhao is a good director with one real gift and one bad habit, and the two films we have reviewed show both.
She made her name on three small films shot in real places, often with people who were not professional actors: Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), on the Pine Ridge reservation, The Rider (2018), about a rodeo rider recovering from injury, and Nomadland (2020), with Frances McDormand among modern nomads. Joshua James Richards has shot three of her films. Then Marvel. Eternals handed her ten immortals, a god the size of a planet and 156 minutes, and she and Ben Davis shot as much of it as they could outdoors near dusk, so that little else the studio has made looks like it. It also stops every ten minutes to explain itself, and its monsters look like effects rather than animals. She took four years off and came back with Hamnet, written with Maggie O'Farrell from O'Farrell's novel.
The gift is patience with a face. The best scenes in Eternals are Ma Dong-seok's Gilgamesh in an apron and Angelina Jolie's Thena at a table, eating, while the rest of the film runs down corridors explaining who sent whom. In Hamnet, Buckley falls apart without once reaching for the audience, and Zhao keeps Paul Mescal's Will at the edge of the frame, which costs the film a Shakespeare and stops it becoming a film about one.
The habit is not trusting the face once she has it. The middle hour of Hamnet holds on weeping well past the point where the weeping has told us everything, and Richter's strings come in under nearly all of it. We cried in the bedroom scenes, and halfway through crying we noticed that the music had told us to, and we resented it. Zhao says "Directing is not intellectual." We believe her. But a string section is not instinct either; it is instruction, and she cut the film herself with Affonso Gonçalves, so the long holds are hers.
The last act of Hamnet, in London, earns most of what the rest asks for, and we recommend it on that and on Buckley. Eternals is for people who like Marvel and would like it quieter. For the next one we would settle for fewer strings and one more table.
Biography
Chloé Zhao (also credited as Zhao Ting) is a Chinese-born filmmaker. She was born on 31 March 1982 in Beijing, China.
Her feature directorial debut was Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015). Subsequent films include The Rider (2018), Nomadland (2020) and the Marvel film Eternals (2021). She directed, co-wrote the screenplay and edited Hamnet (2025).
