Chloé Zhao’s exquisite, heartbreaking “Hamnet” is a story of devastating loss, and of how grief can be slowly transformed into something else, something that lets us move forward. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s delicate 2020 novel (co-adapted for the screen by O’Farrell and Zhao), it features someone we know: William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), here a rather feckless young husband and father who can’t find his place in the small town he grew up in, but transforms in London as a playwright for a theatrical troupe. While he’s gone, his free-spirited wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) tends to their three young children and finds solace in nature — until the day that a terrible, sudden illness claims their only son, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe). “What is given may be taken away at any time,” says William’s stern but sympathetic mother (Emily Mortimer). “Never take for granted that our children’s hearts beat.”

I remember, when first reading O’Farrell’s novel a few years ago, how uncannily the author slipped us into another time, centuries from our own, focusing not on what was different but what remains the same. Zhao, an Academy Award winner for “Nomadland,” here finds that sense of immediacy on film: the trees in the forest, leaves whispering in the wind; the almost painful brightness of red berries; the way a mother’s freckles replicate on her child’s face, like a gentle copy; the uncannily similar sound of a woman giving birth and that same woman, years later, voicing her desperate grief. You disappear into the Elizabethan era when watching it, but the story feels like it’s happening today. Times change; the pang of love and loss remains the same.

Buckley and Mescal, both looking achingly young, beautifully convey the gasping, swimmy passion of first love, and the frustrations when happily-ever-after doesn’t quite work out that way. “I’ve lost my way,” William says, and indeed he has, drinking too much and scribbling bits of writing on scraps. But him finding his bliss in London means that he isn’t there when Agnes and the children need him, and that Agnes must navigate her journey of grief alone. Zhao shows us how a home can be shaped by the empty space of someone’s absence: by a bed that’s no longer there; a voice no longer heard; a tiny, pale ghost boy glimpsed in the shadows, there but not there.

We all process loss differently, and it’s nearly the end of the movie when we learn how William has done so: not through life — he can’t bring himself to do so — but through art, finding a way to let his beloved boy live again. The last moments of “Hamnet” are transcendent, and perhaps the most moving thing I’ve seen on screen this year. Agnes, her face lit by love, reaches out through a magic wall; you feel certain that, on the other side, a small hand is clasping it.

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'HAMNET'

4 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for thematic content, some strong sexuality, and partial nudity)

Running time: 2:05

How to watch: Now in theaters

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