The explosive grief and relief of Hamnet

On paper, Hamnet should be a relentless march through grief. It centres on the death of a child, an absent spouse and the harshness of the world towards women.

What we get instead is two-hours of emotional pressure that end in a release so intense and calibrated that it becomes a genuinely convincing ode to the cathartic, healing power of drama.

Based on the novel of the same name, director Chloé Zhao's (Nomadland) adaptation tells the partly true, mostly fictional story of playwright William Shakespeare and wife Agnes Hathaway grappling with the death of their 11-year-old son, and its relationship to the legendary drama Hamlet.

But it's not really a film about The Bard, who spends large chunks of the run time away on unseen business in London.

It's Agnes, played by Jessie Buckley (Lost Daughter; Chernobyl), who is our heroine. A woman rumoured to be the daughter of a witch, Agnes trains hawks, makes mysterious tinctures from plants and shares a bond with the woods.

The film frequently flirts with magical realism: its many omens, portents, and coincidences often nudging up against the line of fantasy, but always pulls back from the brink.

This could all come off as twee in less capable hands. Luckily, it's carefully tuned, and then held together in reality by Buckley's grounded performance, which captures a knowledgeable, fierce, practical mother - who is often going it alone without her husband - but one who lives in a world where she is repeatedly told the folklore she has inherited, and deeply feels, is wrong just when it matters most.

Buckley delivers bursts of heart-wrenching, explosive grief that hold together Hamnet’s most powerful moments. Her haunting primal scream during her son’s death is hard to forget. The look on Agnes' face in the closing moments is almost worth the price of admission alone.

Meanwhile, Paul Mescal (Gladiator II, Normal People) plays Shakespeare himself. In his finest moments, his presence is magnetic, his smile alone bringing scenes to life, and we understand why Agnes is all in.

At other points - usually in which he is drunkenly writing and battling clunkier bits of the script’s dialogue - it feels a bit too much like watching a man trying to play William Shakespeare.

Brilliantly deployed in the edges of many key scenes is Emily Watson (Synecdoche,New York; Small Things like These), who, as Agnes' well-intentioned mother-in-law makes a compelling role out of a part mostly made up of reaction shots.

It's all held together by the same exceptional technical elements and deep commitment to physical realism we saw in Zhao's Nomadland.

The costumes are tactile, the sets are lived-in and detailed, dirt is visible under everyone's fingernails and you can almost smell 16th century England.

The cinematography (Lukasz Za) is practical, unpretentious and compelling for the most part, but seamlessly moves into moments of real beauty and poetry when called upon.

But in its weakest moments, Hamnet threatens to tread into melodrama.

In a few too many instances, characters stare into the distance and speak in the deep, ominous tones that plague so many biopics.

And it comes dangerously close to corny in a scene in which a despairing Shakespeare stands on the edge of a pier, plucking the words for Hamlet's most famous soliloquy out of the air - verbatim as they appear in the play - as he stares into the abyss.

For these few faults, though, the payoff is too much to deny.

As the film crescendos, the strands come together to unexpectedly reveal the true shape of thing as a whole, in an intricate, nearly mystery-like moment of victory.

But more so, the emotional climb suddenly makes sense. The catharsis, the relief, are visceral.

It is hard not to be pulled under as a torrent of joy and sadness washes over Agnes in the final frames.