Nomadland

Fern, a woman in her sixties, leaves the Nevada town of Empire after its gypsum plant shuts and the settlement is struck from the map. She fits out a van, takes temporary jobs from an Amazon warehouse to a beet harvest, and falls in with older itinerant workers who have made the road their dwelling. She meets Dave, who wants her to stay, yet she keeps returning to the open highway.

Zhao shot among real van dwellers, casting Linda May, Charlene Swankie, and Bob Wells beside McDormand, so that documentary and fiction share the same frame. Serious critics noted the wide Western light, the unhurried camera, and a lead turn that quiets itself among the non actors, letting their faces and stories carry equal weight.

For the clinician, the film holds grief that is carried through movement rather than laid to rest in settlement. It shows solitude chosen after loss, and a mourning that resists being resolved. Fern remains courteous to those who offer her a room and a family, and declines them, staying with a way of living that keeps loss close rather than closing it over.