A woman wakes before dawn in Mexico, already calculating what the day will require of her. There are four children to feed. One needs extra care. Money will come eventually, sent from California in an envelope that may arrive late or thin. She does not dwell on absence. There isn’t time.

Another woman moves through a small English village, hands marked by work, senses attuned to the rhythms of her home. Her husband is often gone. The children remain. So does the responsibility. She knows which herbs to gather, which fears to keep quiet, which griefs will have to wait.

Both women are left behind. Both are expected to endure.

This is not a coincidence. It’s a pattern.

Watching Hamnet, I recognized Agnes immediately, not as a historical figure but as someone familiar. She reminded me of my great-grandmother, who stayed in Mexico with four children while my great-grandfather worked in California, sending remittances back when he could. One of those children had special needs. All of them depended on her. Her labor was constant. Her endurance assumed.

Agnes exists inside that same expectation. In Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name and directed by Chloé Zhao, Agnes is anchored to home, caregiving, and intuition. Hers is the invisible labor that allows everything else to function. While her husband moves outward into the world, Agnes remains, absorbing responsibility and consequence alike.

Her endurance is not abstract. It is physical and fraught with risk. While her husband is away in London, Agnes goes into labor and gives birth to twins without him. She is supported by other women, Shakespeare’s mother and sisters, but the absence remains. He is gone. The responsibility stays at home with her. It’s a pattern that mirrors the experiences of many Latina women who give birth surrounded by mothers, sisters, and tias while their partners are away working, crossing borders, or holding jobs that do not allow them to stop. Support exists, but it is gendered. Women hold women.

In the film, Judith is born last and is feared dead until she is placed into her mother’s arms. It’s a moment that imprints itself. Agnes develops an unshakable intuition that Judith will die, and she holds her tightly because of it. Later, when illness comes for Judith, Agnes’s fear feels confirmed. But it is Hamnet who intervenes. Believing he can outwit death, he offers himself in his sister’s place, convinced the exchange will save her.

Agnes’s intuition is not wrong, only misdirected. Death comes, just not for the child she expected.

This understanding of intuition, as awareness rather than control, is also deeply familiar in Latina households. Latina mothers are often portrayed as dramatic or superstitious, but women’s intuition holding families together is not mysticism. It is a survival skill. It comes from paying attention. From living close to risk. From knowing how quickly everything can change.

Mexican mothers and grandmothers are trusted for their intuition when it is useful – the teas they make, the remedies they insist on, the way they sense something is wrong before anyone else. But that same knowledge is dismissed the moment it cannot be explained or managed.

Agnes lives inside that contradiction too. Her closeness to the natural world, her knowledge of herbs and healing, her independence, the very tools she uses to keep her family alive, make her suspect. She is whispered about. Watched. Labeled. In Hamnet, a woman’s knowledge is never neutral. It is either useful or dangerous. Agnes is not called wise. She is called a witch.

History, of course, remembers Agnes’s husband. William Shakespeare becomes a monument. His wife becomes a footnote, flattened into trivia, reduced to age, geography, or rumor. Hamnet refuses that erasure. It does not argue that Agnes was extraordinary by modern standards. It insists on something quieter and more uncomfortable. She was necessary.

When Hamnet dies, Agnes’s grief is not transformed into a lesson or a spectacle. The film allows it to sit unresolved. She is devastated, and then she continues, because she has other children to keep alive. For anyone raised by women who carried grief quietly, that portrayal feels painfully true.

The heartbreak deepens in the film’s final moments. As Hamlet, a play born from William Shakespeare’s grief, unfolds onstage, Hamnet appears. While the prince dies, Hamnet walks across the stage, steps into a dark doorway, and looks back one last time. It feels like a goodbye meant only for his mother.

That moment echoes earlier in the film, when Agnes holds Hamnet’s hand, something she does when she senses the future and can glimpse what someone will become. In that touch, she sees him onstage in one of his father’s plays. Just before, Hamnet tells her he wants to be in play, just like she envisions.

The irony is devastating. Hamnet does reach the stage, but only through death. Agnes must watch her son disappear into art, into legacy, into something the world will remember, even as it forgets them both. That final goodbye does not stay onstage. It follows Agnes, and it follows many Latina mothers now.

Like Agnes, Latina mothers often sense what’s coming before it arrives. Not because they are mystical, but because they have learned to read danger closely. They hold their children’s hands and imagine futures filled with hope and fear at once, understanding that love cannot guarantee a positive outcome. Preparing a child for the world also means preparing to let them go.

Hamnet does not offer justice. It offers attention. It insists we look at the women whose losses shaped everything that came after, even if no one thought to record them. For those of us who come from those women, from mothers and grandmothers who endured quietly, who gave birth, raised children, and carried grief without applause, that attention feels quietly radical.

Not loud. Not triumphant. Just finally, unmistakably there.