There are years when movies seem to move in packs.
One year, it’s multiverses. Another, it is legacy sequels. Another, it’s sad dads, dead moms, or teenagers staring out rainy windows while the world ends behind them.
And then there are years when filmmakers – whether by design or by some strange collective intuition – tap into the same emotional current at exactly the same time audiences need it.
That was 2025.
Not because every great movie was about grief in the traditional sense. Not because each film dealt with funerals or eulogies or hospital rooms. But because so many of the year’s best films felt haunted by loss. By absence. By the ache of wanting back what cannot be returned. By the human instinct to keep moving even when some essential part of you has been broken, stolen, or buried.
And maybe this all resonated with me because 2025 had already been a year of grief. Three months before the calendar flipped, I lost my friend and brother-in-law, Shane Brown. Then, not long after we rang in the new year, I found myself staring down another kind of grief entirely: trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life after saying goodbye to a job I had held for nearly 22 years. Those are not the same losses. I know that. But grief rarely confines itself to one clean category. Sometimes it comes from death. Sometimes it comes from change. Sometimes it comes from the collapse of the identity you had been carrying for so long you thought it would always be there.
Maybe that is why movies like HAMNET, TRAIN DREAMS, SORRY, BABY, and BRING HER BACK hit as hard as they did. On the surface, these are very different films. Different genres. Different tones. Different textures. One is achingly beautiful. One is quietly devastating. One is intimate and bruised. One is flat-out terrifying. And yet all four are speaking the same language.
Grief.
That word can feel too small sometimes. Too neat. Too sanitized. We tend to treat grief like a stage play with clearly labeled acts: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Roll credits. Heal up. Move on.
Real grief does not work like that.
Real grief is sloppy. It is repetitive. It is irrational. It is embarrassing. It is mundane. It is cosmic. It is doing something the same way you always do and then suddenly remembering who is not there to do it with you. It is going to work. Paying bills. Folding laundry. Laughing at something stupid on television. Then getting hit in the chest out of nowhere because some tiny detail cracked open a door you thought you had nailed shut.
That is what these movies understood.
HAMNET understands grief as something holy and unbearable. It does not just ask what happens when loss enters a home. It asks how loss changes the air inside that home. How it alters the marriage. The body. The silence between two people. How it makes memory both a comfort and a wound. There is such aching beauty in HAMNET, but it is not beauty for beauty’s sake. It is beauty in service of pain. Beauty as a way of saying, “This mattered. This person mattered. This loss is too large for plain speech.” You do not watch HAMNET and think, “What a nice little prestige drama.” You watch it and feel the shape of absence. The ending of HAMNET also reminds us we’re not alone. Hands are stretched out to hold, lift, and carry.
TRAIN DREAMS works on a different frequency. It is grief stretched across a lifetime. The erosion of a man. The erosion of a place. The erosion of a world. It is less interested in one giant emotional eruption than in the slow accumulation of loss that defines so many lives. That is what makes it so quietly shattering. Most of us do not lose everything at once. We lose it in pieces. A person here. A season there. A version of ourselves we did not realize was disappearing until it was already gone. TRAIN DREAMS understands that grief is not always a thunderclap. Sometimes it is weather. Sometimes it is a climate you live inside for so long you stop noticing how cold you’ve become.
Then there is SORRY, BABY, which may not be grief in the most literal sense, but absolutely belongs in this conversation. Trauma and grief are cousins. They live in neighboring houses. They borrow sugar from each other. SORRY, BABY is about the aftermath of rupture; about what it means to keep existing after something devastating has changed the architecture of your inner life. What struck me about that film is how little interest it has in false catharsis. It understands that pain does not leave in a straight line. That healing, if it comes, is messy and partial and human. There is something deeply honest in that. Maybe even comforting. Not because it offers answers, but because it refuses to lie.
And then there is BRING HER BACK, which takes grief and shoves it into the mouth of horror.
That movie understands something ugly but true: grief does not always make us better. Sometimes it makes us desperate. Sometimes it makes us selfish. Sometimes it opens the door to magical thinking, to obsession, to the doomed belief that if we just try hard enough, bargain long enough, bleed enough, we can reverse the irreversible. Horror has always been a wonderful vessel for grief because grief itself is horrifying. It is living in a world that keeps moving after the thing that gave your life shape has been taken out of it. BRING HER BACK takes that sick wish – to undo death, to pull someone back through the door – and turns it into nightmare fuel. It is terrifying because it is emotionally true.
That, I think, is why these films landed.
Not because audiences suddenly decided they wanted to be sad.
Not because misery is trendy.
But because grief has become one of the defining emotional languages of modern life.
People are carrying so much right now. Personal losses, yes. Family losses. The grief of watching parents age. The grief of watching children grow up and realizing whole chapters of your life are now sealed behind you. The grief of friendships thinning out. The grief of realizing the world you thought you lived in may not exist anymore, or maybe never did. The grief of waking up every day to a fresh round of cruelty, chaos, violence, fear, and absurdity pouring out of our phones before we have even brushed our teeth.
Even when the loss is not directly ours, we absorb it. That is what living in the modern world means. We are constantly witnessing something breaking. A norm. A community. A body. A family. A sense of safety. A sense of decency. Some days it feels like the whole human project is one long scroll through things falling apart.
And so maybe it should not surprise us that the movies which resonated most deeply in 2025 were the ones willing to sit in that feeling instead of sprinting past it.
The best of them did not offer easy solutions. They did not pretend closure is tidy. They did not package pain into inspirational poster quotes. They simply recognized what so many people already know in their bones: loss changes you. Sometimes beautifully. Sometimes grotesquely. Sometimes forever.
What I find moving is that these films are not all hopeless.
That is the other lie we tell about grief – that to acknowledge it is to surrender to darkness. But grief, when treated honestly, can also clarify. It can reveal what matters. It can strip away pretense. It can make us gentler, if we let it. It can remind us that love and grief are twins. You do not get one without risking the other. The depth of mourning is often the clearest evidence of the depth of care.
That is part of what makes HAMNET so devastating. What makes TRAIN DREAMS so haunting. What makes SORRY, BABY so intimate. What makes BRING HER BACK so upsetting. All of them, in their own way, are telling us the same thing: to be human is to lose. And to keep going anyway.
Maybe that is what audiences were responding to in 2025. Not sadness for sadness’s sake. Not prestige misery. Recognition.
A sense that somebody else sees it too.
The loneliness. The fear. The ache. The weird numbness. The private pain. The public dread. The feeling that we are all, in one way or another, learning how to live alongside ghosts.
And if that is true, then maybe these films were not just about grief.
Maybe they were about connection.
Because nothing makes people feel less alone than art that looks straight at the thing they are carrying and says, “Yes. I know. Me too.”
In 2025, the Movies Knew We Were Grieving
There are years when movies seem to move in packs.
One year, it’s multiverses. Another, it is legacy sequels. Another, it’s sad dads, dead moms, or teenagers staring out rainy windows while the world ends behind them.
And then there are years when filmmakers – whether by design or by some strange collective intuition – tap into the same emotional current at exactly the same time audiences need it.
That was 2025.
Not because every great movie was about grief in the traditional sense. Not because each film dealt with funerals or eulogies or hospital rooms. But because so many of the year’s best films felt haunted by loss. By absence. By the ache of wanting back what cannot be returned. By the human instinct to keep moving even when some essential part of you has been broken, stolen, or buried.
And maybe this all resonated with me because 2025 had already been a year of grief. Three months before the calendar flipped, I lost my friend and brother-in-law, Shane Brown. Then, not long after we rang in the new year, I found myself staring down another kind of grief entirely: trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life after saying goodbye to a job I had held for nearly 22 years. Those are not the same losses. I know that. But grief rarely confines itself to one clean category. Sometimes it comes from death. Sometimes it comes from change. Sometimes it comes from the collapse of the identity you had been carrying for so long you thought it would always be there.
Maybe that is why movies like HAMNET, TRAIN DREAMS, SORRY, BABY, and BRING HER BACK hit as hard as they did. On the surface, these are very different films. Different genres. Different tones. Different textures. One is achingly beautiful. One is quietly devastating. One is intimate and bruised. One is flat-out terrifying. And yet all four are speaking the same language.
Grief.
That word can feel too small sometimes. Too neat. Too sanitized. We tend to treat grief like a stage play with clearly labeled acts: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Roll credits. Heal up. Move on.
Real grief does not work like that.
Real grief is sloppy. It is repetitive. It is irrational. It is embarrassing. It is mundane. It is cosmic. It is doing something the same way you always do and then suddenly remembering who is not there to do it with you. It is going to work. Paying bills. Folding laundry. Laughing at something stupid on television. Then getting hit in the chest out of nowhere because some tiny detail cracked open a door you thought you had nailed shut.
That is what these movies understood.
HAMNET understands grief as something holy and unbearable. It does not just ask what happens when loss enters a home. It asks how loss changes the air inside that home. How it alters the marriage. The body. The silence between two people. How it makes memory both a comfort and a wound. There is such aching beauty in HAMNET, but it is not beauty for beauty’s sake. It is beauty in service of pain. Beauty as a way of saying, “This mattered. This person mattered. This loss is too large for plain speech.” You do not watch HAMNET and think, “What a nice little prestige drama.” You watch it and feel the shape of absence. The ending of HAMNET also reminds us we’re not alone. Hands are stretched out to hold, lift, and carry.
TRAIN DREAMS works on a different frequency. It is grief stretched across a lifetime. The erosion of a man. The erosion of a place. The erosion of a world. It is less interested in one giant emotional eruption than in the slow accumulation of loss that defines so many lives. That is what makes it so quietly shattering. Most of us do not lose everything at once. We lose it in pieces. A person here. A season there. A version of ourselves we did not realize was disappearing until it was already gone. TRAIN DREAMS understands that grief is not always a thunderclap. Sometimes it is weather. Sometimes it is a climate you live inside for so long you stop noticing how cold you’ve become.
Then there is SORRY, BABY, which may not be grief in the most literal sense, but absolutely belongs in this conversation. Trauma and grief are cousins. They live in neighboring houses. They borrow sugar from each other. SORRY, BABY is about the aftermath of rupture; about what it means to keep existing after something devastating has changed the architecture of your inner life. What struck me about that film is how little interest it has in false catharsis. It understands that pain does not leave in a straight line. That healing, if it comes, is messy and partial and human. There is something deeply honest in that. Maybe even comforting. Not because it offers answers, but because it refuses to lie.
And then there is BRING HER BACK, which takes grief and shoves it into the mouth of horror.
That movie understands something ugly but true: grief does not always make us better. Sometimes it makes us desperate. Sometimes it makes us selfish. Sometimes it opens the door to magical thinking, to obsession, to the doomed belief that if we just try hard enough, bargain long enough, bleed enough, we can reverse the irreversible. Horror has always been a wonderful vessel for grief because grief itself is horrifying. It is living in a world that keeps moving after the thing that gave your life shape has been taken out of it. BRING HER BACK takes that sick wish – to undo death, to pull someone back through the door – and turns it into nightmare fuel. It is terrifying because it is emotionally true.
That, I think, is why these films landed.
Not because audiences suddenly decided they wanted to be sad.
Not because misery is trendy.
But because grief has become one of the defining emotional languages of modern life.
People are carrying so much right now. Personal losses, yes. Family losses. The grief of watching parents age. The grief of watching children grow up and realizing whole chapters of your life are now sealed behind you. The grief of friendships thinning out. The grief of realizing the world you thought you lived in may not exist anymore, or maybe never did. The grief of waking up every day to a fresh round of cruelty, chaos, violence, fear, and absurdity pouring out of our phones before we have even brushed our teeth.
Even when the loss is not directly ours, we absorb it. That is what living in the modern world means. We are constantly witnessing something breaking. A norm. A community. A body. A family. A sense of safety. A sense of decency. Some days it feels like the whole human project is one long scroll through things falling apart.
And so maybe it should not surprise us that the movies which resonated most deeply in 2025 were the ones willing to sit in that feeling instead of sprinting past it.
The best of them did not offer easy solutions. They did not pretend closure is tidy. They did not package pain into inspirational poster quotes. They simply recognized what so many people already know in their bones: loss changes you. Sometimes beautifully. Sometimes grotesquely. Sometimes forever.
What I find moving is that these films are not all hopeless.
That is the other lie we tell about grief – that to acknowledge it is to surrender to darkness. But grief, when treated honestly, can also clarify. It can reveal what matters. It can strip away pretense. It can make us gentler, if we let it. It can remind us that love and grief are twins. You do not get one without risking the other. The depth of mourning is often the clearest evidence of the depth of care.
That is part of what makes HAMNET so devastating. What makes TRAIN DREAMS so haunting. What makes SORRY, BABY so intimate. What makes BRING HER BACK so upsetting. All of them, in their own way, are telling us the same thing: to be human is to lose. And to keep going anyway.
Maybe that is what audiences were responding to in 2025. Not sadness for sadness’s sake. Not prestige misery. Recognition.
A sense that somebody else sees it too.
The loneliness. The fear. The ache. The weird numbness. The private pain. The public dread. The feeling that we are all, in one way or another, learning how to live alongside ghosts.
And if that is true, then maybe these films were not just about grief.
Maybe they were about connection.
Because nothing makes people feel less alone than art that looks straight at the thing they are carrying and says, “Yes. I know. Me too.”