It’s not a matter of if an audience will cry at Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet but when. In my case, at the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere, it happened late in the film, when one character reaches a hand out to another. I’d been surrounded by sniffling and the discreet sounds of people rifling through bags for tissues for several minutes, but that extended hand put at least one audience member several rows behind me past the point of composure. I heard a gulping kind of sob. I can’t pass much judgment, since my eyes were watery enough that I had to remove my glasses, though I managed to reserve my own real sob until the first time I tried to speak to my friend after the screening.

Crying — how much festival audiences have engaged in it, how devastated the weeping was, which c

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