Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal and Chloé Zhao capture just how art channels our emotions in a mystical period drama about a death in the Shakespeare family.

Chloé Zhao’s wrenching adaptation of the bestselling 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell has been described as being about how Shakespeare wrote Hamlet after his young son, Hamnet, died. While technically accurate, that misses the exact mechanics of Zhao’s immersive account of the desire, grief, love and anger that course between a woman and her playwright husband, culminating in a remarkable demonstration of what art can do.