With Hamnet, Chloé Zhao ventures into an ambitious, sensory adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name; a speculative portrait of grief and creation in the life of William Shakespeare.

The film takes its starting point in the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet in 1596, a historical detail that is magnified here into an emotional and artistic origin myth. What does it mean to transform loss into art? And how do private grief and public imagination relate to one another?

Zhao opts for a distinct stylistic approach, in which symbolism and images of nature accumulate. Central to the story is Agnes (Jessie Buckley), an intuitive, almost mythical figure who lives close to nature and bears the loss physically, while Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) retreats into silence and work.

That emphatic visual language sometimes teeters on the edge of the melodramatic, but ultimately culminates in an exceptional conclusion. In the final act, when personal grief is transformed into theater, Hamnet reaches a moment of rare catharsis in which art, mourning, and collective experience converge.