This is a film about grief, about how its ferocity can isolate and divide people.

What was it like to live with William Shakespeare? To love a man who, as his wife says in this film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, “has more inside him than any man I’ve ever met”?

The aspiring writer (Paul Mescal), who is never named in the film until he emerges as a playwright, is tutoring Latin to pay off his father’s debts when he first meets Agnes (Jessie Buckley, both pictured), a herbalist, falconer and beekeeper whom we see curled up asleep, as if literally at one with nature, in the near-mythic forests that surround them. Their mutual passion is immediate and, when she becomes pregnant, their families are forced to accept their marriage. They will have three children: a daughter, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and twins, Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), but he had first won her by telling a story, Orpheus and Eurydice, that foreshadows what is to come.

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