Hamnet (2025)

The project didn’t originally include “On the Nature of Daylight.” “I wrote a different cue for the ending of ‘Hamnet,’ ” [Rihter] said. “But ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ really got under the skin of the film.” He sounded defeated. “They played it on set, for hours and hours and hours.” The director and co-writer, Chloé Zhao, hadn’t yet finalized the end of the movie, and Jessie Buckley, who starred as Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, sent her “Daylight.” When Zhao listened to it, she had an epiphany about how to wrap up the story—the hands of the audience reaching onto the stage at the Globe Theatre, set to the strains of the twenty-year-old song. “We had a lot of conversations where I was saying, ‘Look, it’s been in loads of films. I think we need an original score,’ ” Richter said. “It was quite an intense back-and-forth.” (Zhao told IndieWire, in 2025, “We live in a culture that is so afraid not to generate new things.”)

— Jane Bua (The New Yorker)