The first thing likely to hit you about Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel is the rawness and tenderness of the picture. The stunningly framed, exquisitely composed shots will disarm many of the audience familiar with the novel. But Hamnet, a study of grief revolving around the family of England’s most famous writer and his most adapted play, finds some worlds easier to create than others.

In Stratford-Upon-Avon, young tutor William Shaspeare (Paul Mescal) meets Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) and the pair quickly form a relationship. They marry when Agnes falls pregnant, but Will is unsettled. Agnes encourages him to head to the hustle and bustle of London, while she stays in Stratford with their three children, Susannah and twins Judith and Hamnet.

As plague ravages England, Judith falls ill, and in her recovery passes to her twin brother, who dies before Shakespeare can get back home. The parents drift apart in their grief, Will in London and Agnes in Stratford, before she finally heads to the capital to see what her husband has been working on, the Tragedie of Hamlet.

Casting new light on Shakespeare, his family and his works is no mean feat, not least because the playwright is a well-established ‘figure on film’ but not even universally acknowledged to have existed in reality. O’Farrell’s literary treatment is admired for its imagination, and Zhao’s team’s vision delivers some of the year’s most incredible cinematic moments. But Hamnet succeeds and falls on what lies behind its feelings. 

Hamnet has an understandable staginess, but cinematically, it’s elevated by the skilful ‘ghost camera’ technique of cinematographer Łukasz Żal. His lens drifts through the film observing sets and locations mainly lit by natural light, refreshingly clear of soggy deep focus. Zhao arranges symmetrical frames and squaresets, reinforcing the staginess, but encouraging an essential lack of judgement. It’s down to Mescal and mainly Buckley to hold our attention in Zhou’s rectangles. The frames often hold, or move beyond characters, in clear fluid arcs, leaving them offscreen to walk back on, as we increasingly feel that we’re floating into intimate scenes like a ghost.

It’s engrossing because manifestations of loss and grief are soaked into Hamnet. Unobtrusive technical touches keep the melodrama downplayed, and a soft realism in focus. The front of the film is steeped in foreshadowing. Agnes’s familial connections and mysticism are thinly, but skillfully sketched. She foresees two children at her deathbed, but agonisingly fails to see Hamnet’s fate. The young twins swap clothes, anticipating not only the all-male casts of Shakespeare’s plays, the identity- and gender-swapping roles of a play like Twelfth Night (written after Hamlet), but also the cruel game of bait and switch the plague plays on Judith and Hamnet (painfully doubled down on by Will’s belated arrival). 

The foreshadowing and mirroring are superb. Following Hamnet’s loss, Agnes rages at Will to go back to London in a direct recall to her happy farewell to him years before, when she pushes him out of his drunken depression (a satisfying, wholly different and heartbreaking tone to “go, go”). 

Soon after, in London, the camera stays fixed on the distracted Shakespeare as his actors struggle to capture the pivotal scene between Hamlet and Ophelia. Clear on Will’s forehead is the scar of the gash Agness had used her natural remedies to heal when they first met. before.

But it’s in London, as we properly arrive with Agnes and her brother (a solid Joe Alwyn), and we first hear Shakespeare’s name, that the intimacy strains and the story derails. Hamnet is best when exploring the liminal places: we see, in brilliantly sparing shots, the quiet, familiar place where Hamnet finds himself at death; We learn, lightly, the place Will’s been trapped in (his mind).

Inside the globe, a specially built and strangely unboisterous theatre, we’re left to watch characters earnestly watch the players on stage (“Don’t you dare pronounce my son’s anime”). It’s hard to see the emotion of the crowd channelled into Agnes, and it resolves very much like a “Shakespeare 101.” Buckley does best with Agnes’s utter confusion as she drifts into understanding, and there’s a great and effective cut to the central stage door to recall that “Undiscovered country.” But the painted backdrop of trees pales in comparison to the earlier rural scenes, and Shakespeare can’t help but come across as a bit smug. 

Fortunately, Max Richter is on hand with an old classic. ‘On The Nature of Daylight’ can get the hardest viewer welling, but there’s no doubt Hamnet is better in otherworldly places, and oddly not on the stage.