Nomadland

After the closure of the town's sole employer and the death of her husband, Fern leaves Empire, Nevada — a mining town that literally ceases to exist as an incorporated place — and takes to the road in a converted van. Chloé Zhao doesn't tell this as a conventional story of homelessness; instead, it's an examination of an alternative way of living — a community of nomads, many played by real people playing versions of themselves, bound together less by need than by a refusal to fit the model of a permanent house, a mortgage, and a settled old age.

The film is built on the contrast between Fern's seasonal work — in warehouses, campgrounds, beet harvests — and the vast, empty American landscapes shot in Zhao's signature dusk light. That visual choice isn't decorative: the scale of the land keeps reminding us of the disproportion between one person's loss and the country she moves through, largely without a destination.

Frances McDormand plays Fern without melodrama or performed self-pity — her grief shows up not in monologues but in pauses, in how she handles her late husband's belongings, in her refusal of the easy offers to settle down that keep coming her way throughout the film. Zhao consistently avoids turning this into a social pamphlet — the film passes no clean verdict on whether this life is salvation or flight; it simply presents it as a choice with its own logic and its own cost.

Blending professional actors with actual members of the nomad community — most notably Bob Wells, a real organizer of the movement — dissolves the line between documentary and fiction, and it's that authenticity that keeps Fern's story from tipping into romanticizing homelessness.

Nomadland offers no resolution to grief — the film ends not with healing but with continued motion, which becomes, in itself, a form of remembering what was lost.