The Psychic Power of Pictures: Lessons from the Film Hamnet

There are moments in the mystic path when the unseen speaks louder than words, when silence is more powerful that anything you could say. Clients come to me carrying energy pictures that hover just behind their words—grief that hasn’t yet found a mouth, memories that aren’t quite memories, and emotional echoes that drift like fog in the auric field. As clairvoyants and intuitives, part of our work is helping those unspoken pictures rise to the surface, find purchase in the present moment, and be seen.

Recently, I sat in a dark movie theatre and felt that same subtle unveiling happening all around me. The film was Hamnet—Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel—and it struck me as one of those rare pieces of art that doesn’t simply tell a story. It calls forth the truth sitting inside us.

And not just in the plot.

The real power is in the act of watching it together.

The film is a meditation on grief, yes, but also on the mysterious alchemy through which pain becomes art—and art becomes the language that speaks for us when we cannot speak for ourselves. If you’ve ever sat in a reading and felt the client’s unspoken sorrow crystallize into an image before your inner sight, you’ll recognize the territory instantly.

The story of Hamnet revolves around the death of Shakespeare’s son, and the way that grief—sharp, incoherent, and stubbornly untranslatable—metabolizes into creativity. Critics have called the film devastating and emotionally shattering, and they’re not wrong. But what moved me most wasn't just the tragedy itself; it was the way the film honored the silences around it.

In psychic language, I’d call those silences energy pictures:

Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, moves through her mourning not through speech but through intuition, symbol, dream, and bodily knowing. Her journey is eerie in its familiarity to anyone who has walked through personal loss—or held space for someone else’s.

William's grief moves differently; he struggles to express himself to those near and around him, has trouble being physically present in the emotions that are so intense in those who want nothing more than to grieve with him. It's easy to see his grief as wrong or incorrect, but it's just different. He finds a way to give his grief voice, and it is unexpected and just as legitimate. 

Grief rarely presents itself in a tidy monologue. More often, it appears as:

Hamnet understands that truth instinctively. It doesn’t rush to name anything. It lets the pictures form, activate, and release - which is a pattern that all clairvoyants will recognize instantly.

What surprised me most was what happened in the room.

Because watching Hamnet in a theatre isn’t just “seeing a film.” It’s participating in a communal energy-working, whether or not people realize that’s what they’re doing. You can feel the field shift—the subtle synchrony of people breathing, crying, holding, remembering. One critic called the film’s ending a “stroke of genius” for how it generates collective catharsis, and honestly, that was my experience too.

Sitting there, I realized:
 this is exactly how psychic community works.

A group of strangers, in the dark, witnessing something together. A shared grief rising to the surface, mirrored in real time. The screen illuminates the room the way spiritual insight lights up the inner world—suddenly, what was invisible becomes visible. What was mute begins to take shape.

It felt like a healing disguised as cinema.

And I can’t help but think: isn’t this what we aim to create in our spiritual spaces?
A room where the unspoken can breathe - named and unnamed.
Where art, energy, and attention weave together into personal revelation.
Where we don’t have to articulate the wound with the "right words" to begin releasing it.

This film touches every corner of intuitive practice:

And for those who have felt disenfranchised or harmed by spiritual communities, Hamnet offers a different template—one of honesty, tenderness, and non-hierarchical witnessing. No guru, no performance, no bypassing. Just presence. Just truth. Just the rawness of being human and spiritual at the same time.

If you decide to watch Hamnet, here are some places you might bring your awareness:

And if you watch it with a group, notice how the emotional resonance weaves among viewers. You might just feel the subtle ecosystems of healing forming in real time.

Performance is one of the oldest mediums we have—not just because it expresses truth, but because it evokes the truths we aren’t yet ready to name. Hamnet reminded me how powerful that invocation can be. Sometimes, the energy pictures we carry don’t need a conversation or a reading or a ritual. They need an image. They need a story. They need a moment of collective witnessing in the dark.

And sometimes, that is enough to begin the healing.