Chloé Zhao emerges from her cave — her words, not mine — with “ Hamnet .”

It’s a film that feels less like a period drama and more like a spiritual excavation. The co-writer and director, who spent a decade traversing America for her first three features before winning an Oscar for “Nomadland” (2020), has created something that operates on a frequency beyond traditional narrative filmmaking. It’s a dangerous kind of vulnerability, and Zhao knows it.

“We’re experiencing our tools to bring us to the present moment, moment by moment,” Zhao explains, her words tumbling out in the associative way of someone describing the indescribable. “So it doesn’t feel like we did it because it’s channeled. It came through us.”

This channeling required Zhao to confront parts of herself she’d kept caref

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