For centuries, William Shakespeare has existed as a monolith. We know the plays, the Sonnets, the academic arguments. What we don’t know, really, is the life: the household, the marriage, the mess. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel, is a full-body reimagination of Shakespeare’s domestic universe. Zhao takes a figure who’s usually a statue and gives him a beating heart, a wife with a spine of fire, and a son whose brief life becomes the emotional detonator behind one of literature’s most famous tragedies.

Before Shakespeare becomes Shakespeare, he’s just Will: a restless young tutor who falls for Agnes Hathaway (Anne Hathaway in real life), a woman of the woods. Their attraction is immediate and together they build a life: first a daughter, then twins. One of them is a boy named Hamnet, played as the kind of child who seems destined to die in a devastating period drama. The film opens with a statement explaining that, at this point in the medieval language, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were equivalent and interchangeable. This fact is the foundation of Hamnet. What if Hamlet, one of Shakespeare's most legendary plays, was born in the grief of two parents forced to bury their child.

The plague arrives and, despite concern for Hamnet’s more sickly twin sister Judith, takes the life of Shakespeare’s only son while he is away in London. His death fractures everything. Jesse Buckley’s Agnes implodes with a kind of grief that feels almost supernatural in its intensity, as Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare folds inward with guilt.

From here, Hamnet becomes less about the facts of William Shakespeare’s life, and more about the violence of loss: the way it rearranges a household and hollows out a marriage.

In order to fully process Hamnet’s final act, we need to revisit Hamlet (briefly).

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy about a prince who cannot stop thinking long enough to actually avenge his father. Prince Hamlet returns home to Denmark after the sudden death of his father, only to find his mother remarried to his uncle Claudius, who has seized the throne. The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears and reveals the truth: Claudius murdered him. The play becomes a study of mourning, madness, and the terrifying distance between wanting justice and achieving it. It is about a son navigating the weight of loss and the impossibility of repairing what has already been destroyed.

Historically, theatre scholars believe Shakespeare may have performed the role of the Ghost in early productions of Hamlet, as he does in Hamnet. In the film’s context this choice becomes deeply symbolic. The Ghost is the father whose death defines the story.

Years after Hamnet’s death, Agnes attends a performance of her husband’s new play, Hamlet. The famous Globe theatre is packed with people who treat the play like entertainment, to a grieving mother’s horror.

As the play unfolds, Agnes sees a version of her son brought back to life onstage. Her rage softens, and in what’s already being called one of the year’s most haunting endings, she reaches toward the actor playing her son. The audience around her mirrors the gesture. A grief that was once private becomes a collective, almost operatic act of communal resurrection.

Hamnet is not a Shakespeare biography, but a story about how unimaginable grief can— and perhaps did—become the seed of great art.