We are told about Ophelia’s drowning in Hamlet with a single, stunning image. We hear she was underneath a ‘willow’ by a ‘glassy stream’ making ‘garlands…of nettles, daisies and long purples’ until she fell in and, dazed by heartbreak, ‘her clothes spread wide…mermaid-like’ until ‘heavy with their drink’ they ‘pull’d the poor wretch…to muddy death’. It was the inspiration for Millais’ famous portrait.

Such passages in Shakespeare are common. He will suddenly, in the middle of the play, have characters veer off into a poetic vision so beautifully drawn it’s like we’re being asked to imagine a painting. When Romeo spies Juliet, she ‘hangs upon the cheek of night, Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear’. It’s a perfect description of fancying someone at a party. She’s like a gem glimmering in the darkness. Cleopatra arriving in her ‘golden’ barge that ‘burned on the water’ is like a flame that blazes into Anthony’s life. He deeply understood the power of the image. He would have been the most fantastic film director.

And yet, being Shakespeare, he’s too wise to simply romanticise Ophelia’s death. We come back to earth with a bump at the end of this speech with her ‘muddy death’. The line stops short, a third of the length of the rest, to reflect its brutality, as do the simple, blunt words.

“…the film deeply understands the terrible reality of bereavement. The death of an eleven-year-old child and its effect on the parents is dramatised in some of the most heartbreaking scenes you will see in the cinema.”

Chloe Zhao’s HAMNET works like this, too. Her images are exquisite. Half of them look like Vermeer paintings. The production designer creates the most convincing Shakespearean England I’ve ever seen, but Zhao’s lens also allows us to enjoy the beauty of white aprons in the morning light of a Tudor kitchen. The camera swoons over nature, swooping with hawks, up through the leaves of an oak in springtime and racing along with young lovers in a wood.

And yet the film deeply understands the terrible reality of bereavement. The death of an eleven-year-old child and its effect on the parents is dramatised in some of the most heartbreaking scenes you will see in the cinema. It is never traumatising, the lens carefully swinging away from one moment that would have been too much, but it does not gloss over the horror. There is no movie-crying here. Jessie Buckley’s scream after her son dies will stay with you long after the film has finished.

Both Shakespeare and Zhao acknowledge the beauty of grief, which is, of course, a form of love, as well as its horrific reality. Whatever you have lost will be touched upon when you see this film. Tears streamed down my face, my breath coming in shudders by the end. But Zhao’s images remind you again and again to pay attention to the wonder of life. Whatever you have lost, the film reminds us, you are here, and life is extraordinary.

“Whatever you have lost, the film reminds us, you are here, and life is extraordinary.”

Shakespeare was also obsessed with how similar to life a play was: ‘all the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players’. What he meant was that it’s a brilliant blaze and then it’s over. Again, there’s pain as well as beauty in its ending, but it’s worth experiencing, which was presumably why he wrote thirty-four of them. As Maggie O’Farrell so imaginatively explored in Hamnet the novel, Hamlet was almost undoubtedly where Shakespeare worked out the agony of losing his eleven-year-old son four years earlier. Hamlet is suicidal because Shakespeare knew how normal it was to feel that you can’t go on whilst in the throes of grief. Every moment of Zhao’s film works. She doesn’t put a foot wrong. It’s real, it’s funny, it’s carefree, it’s deep. To talk about loss, she, too, has created something sublime.

See it in a cinema. Let the full force of those images and performances wash over you. You will weep and you will marvel and you will leave feeling glad to be alive.