In the final minutes of Hamnet, Chlo\u00e9 Zhao\u2019s stunning tale of grief and nature, William Shakespeare puts on a play. The very first performance of Hamlet comes as a surprise to his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley), who has never seen her husband\u2019s work as the Bard and is stunned to discover he has used their late son\u2019s name for his protagonist. She expects to be horrified by this shameless appropriation of both her child and the pain of his loss. Instead, she, and the audience, experience the beauty of art as filtered through the unique lens of human love and vulnerability. It\u2019s a scene that would surely inspire a few shed tears among audiences, but it\u2019s in its use of a now-familiar piece of music, \u201cOn The Nature Of Daylight\u201d by Max Richter, where Hamnet becomes the biggest tearjerker of 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This already heightened scene of catharsis following the anguish of losing a child is pushed over the edge by Richter\u2019s soaring strings, which evoke the works of Brian Eno and Philip Glass. That the piece of music is now so familiar to audiences only adds to the emotional anticipation. Once you recognize it, you can\u2019t keep the tears away. It\u2019s not hard to see why Richter would reuse his most well-worn number or why Zhao would include it. \u201cSometimes our truth can only be felt in silence,\u201d Zhao said<\/a>, \u201cand maybe with Max Richter\u2019s music playing in the background.\u201d It\u2019s a stunningly effective choice, but it also signals the need for a cultural full stop on this piece.\u00a0<\/p>\n \ufeff\ufeffHow To Make A Killing comes from director John Patton Ford, who most recently helmed Emily The Criminal starring Aubrey Plaza. His new project has had a bit of a twisty path to the screen. Loosely based on the 1949 British film Kind Hearts And Coronets, Ford\u2019s screenplay appeared on the Blacklist (then titled Rothschild) in 2014, and as of 2019, director Jon S. Baird was going to direct it with Shia LaBeouf and Mel Gibson attached to star. It\u2019s not exactly clear why that didn\u2019t work out but by 2023, the film was renamed Huntington, Powell was attached, and Ford would direct. How To Make A Killing only publicly received that new title last week, per Deadline<\/a>.\u00a0How To Make A Killing hits theaters on February 20, 2026.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Richter wrote the score for Hamnet, but he returned to his acclaimed back catalog for its finale, borrowing \u201cOn The Nature Of Daylight\u201d from his 2004 release The Blue Notebooks. The album, which The Guardian<\/a> heralded as one of the greatest pieces of classical music from the 21st century, was written as what Richter described<\/a> as \u201ca protest album about Iraq, a meditation on violence\u2014both the violence that I had personally experienced around me as a child and the violence of war, at the utter futility of so much armed conflict.\u201d Its second track quickly became one of Richter\u2019s signature works. It\u2019s devastating in its subtlety and instantly affecting. As writer and composer Zoe Sones explained in Indie Tips<\/a>, \u201cMax Richter speaks of how he wants his music to be a listening space to think. The simplicity behind the building blocks of this composition creates a space that isn\u2019t too invasive to our subconscious. The piece moves along.\u201d You don\u2019t need to be a classical music expert to respond viscerally to Richter\u2019s work. \u201cOn The Nature Of Daylight\u201d so acutely captures a sense of both loss and love that it\u2019s no wonder filmmakers keep using it over and over and over.<\/p>\n It only took a couple of years following The Blue Notebooks\u2018 release for Hollywood to become inspired. Martin Scorsese used it in Shutter Island<\/a>, his surreal noir about a twisty missing person case in a psychiatric facility. The ensemble drama Disconnect included it on their soundtrack for a story about modern technology\u2019s ability to strip humans of real bonding experiences. It\u2019s so prominently (and crushingly) used in Denis Villeneuve\u2019s Arrival<\/a> that it led to the film\u2019s actual composer, J\u00f3hann J\u00f3hannsson, being deemed ineligible<\/a> for a Best Score Oscar. It makes sense, because the track is the musical glue of a sci-fi story about the inevitability of grief. After Shutter Island brought it to audiences, it was Arrival that cemented the cultural status of \u201cOn The Nature Of Daylight.\u201d This was the music for making audiences cry, with hope as well as sadness.<\/p>\n But Hamnet truly feels like the last time we can get away with using this Richter piece in a narrative. Zhao and Richter use it so sublimely in this climactic outpouring of grief and creativity, a well-earned moment of catharsis through art, that they earn the right to repeat what is now clich\u00e9. It is but one piece of music in a film full of gorgeous compositions by an artist with a cohesive vision in mind. The conclusion of the film invites us to feel the closure that Agnes is finally experiencing, with Richter\u2019s familiar finale complementing the excellent performance of Jessie Buckley rather than doing the legwork in place of her. Zhao could have used silence and still made this moment work; after all, she got the tears flowing earlier in the movie with Hamnet\u2019s death, and that is done with no score.<\/p>\n Directors return to familiar musical beats for a reason. Tropes get worn out because they help emphasize the universality of our emotions. Think of the close-up during that big monologue, the third-act race through the airport, and the training montage scored by an inspirational bop. A bit like what you get from casting a movie star, it\u2019s not unheard of for those coordinating a film\u2019s music to rely on the audience\u2019s awareness of its prior uses to make that big moment land. Vietnam War movies use \u201cFortunate Son\u201d by Creedence Clearwater Revival because of Forrest Gump (itself riffing on Apocalypse Now), but also because it so strongly exemplifies a particular blend of nostalgia and struggle.\u00a0<\/p>\n But \u201cFortunate Son,\u201d like a select few other tracks, are now all but prohibited for use as needle drops. You can\u2019t use Queen\u2019s \u201cWe Are The Champions\u201d or Marvin Gaye\u2019s \u201cLet\u2019s Get It On,\u201d regardless of their appropriateness for the scene, because they\u2019re so overused that nothing can overcome their tedious familiarity. Now they just play like a joke. The same goes for many a tearjerking favorite, like \u201cHopp\u00edpolla\u201d by Sigur R\u00f3s. It\u2019s one of the greats of 2000s post-rock, but it\u2019s now been reduced to lazy shorthand for cheaply earned pathos. It\u2019s practically a \u201cPlease Sob\u201d sign flashing before a live studio audience. \u201cOn The Nature Of Daylight\u201d is at risk of befalling this fate, not simply from overuse, but because of how similarly it\u2019s always rolled out. If it becomes the go-to \u201ccry but fear not\u201d soundtrack, it will lose its power.<\/p>\n Pre-Hamnet, it was already becoming the de facto cheat-code cry music of film and TV, and listeners were lamenting its overuse as early as 2020<\/a>. Now we\u2019re in an era of \u201cOn The Nature Of Daylight\u201d overkill, where it becomes cheap compensation for half-assed storytelling. It\u2019s already been poorly used in shows like 9-1-1 and Castle Rock, providing that cheap sentiment where the narrative cannot compensate.\u00a0 It\u2019s been deployed in media as varied as Willem Dafoe\u2019s Disney dog movie Togo<\/a> and an episode of the long-running British soap opera EastEnders. The latter is especially odd given the disconnect between the sturdy kitchen-sink drama and the delicacy of Richter\u2019s compositions. Even that show used it the same way everyone else did: to score a moment blending tragedy with hope (albeit on a sinking river boat). Last year, \u201cOn The Nature Of Daylight\u201d seemed like it may have reached its saturation point with The Last Of Us episode \u201cLong, Long Time<\/a>,\u201d which told the love story between Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett). Over the course of a decade, and with the backdrop of an all-consuming apocalypse, this pair live a good life together, and they choose to end it on their terms. Death comes for us all, but life wins.\u00a0<\/p>\n Because \u201cOn The Nature Of Daylight\u201d works best when overwhelming loss is balanced by hope, you\u2019re invited to cry with happiness as much as with desolation. Bill and Frank choose to die together rather than let the bleakness of a dystopian world win. In Arrival, Louise embraces the pain she knows is to come in her future because it is a worthy price to pay for the joy that will accompany it. The climactic performance that brings together a family and a community in Hamnet is a salve that heals the Shakespeares and unites them in love. This canny blend of music, source material, technical craft, and performance means that Hamnet has now thoroughly claimed \u201cOn The Nature Of Daylight.\u201d Any other piece of media trying to use it in the following years will feel not just rote, but like obvious thievery. That music now belongs to Hamnet, and it should for the foreseeable future.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOn The Nature Of Daylight\u201d will surely become as familiar a piece of classical music to film and TV audiences as the 1812 Overture or \u201cAlso Sprach Zarathustra.\u201d It has proven its effectiveness for scoring moments of grief and hope, for providing the sonic foundation of weepy climaxes that still make us smile with optimism for the world. But let\u2019s admit that it\u2019s peaked. Let\u2019s take Hamnet as a sign to stop turning such powerful music into an easy way out for quick emotional manipulation. Even the most earnest uses of \u201cOn The Nature Of Daylight\u201d post-Hamnet will pale in comparison to its most carefully artful use. Before this film, it was already in danger of becoming a thoughtlessly employed \u201ccry here\u201d signal. After Hamnet, it will become even more defined as the ultimate sob-inducing track, and filmmakers everywhere should note (and avoid) its looming status as a clich\u00e9.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the final minutes of Hamnet, Chlo\u00e9 Zhao\u2019s stunning tale of grief and nature, William Shakespeare puts on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":316837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":{"0":"post-316836","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/316837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}