The hottest ticket at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival wasn’t a buzzy horror premiere or a star-studded ensemble — it was a period drama about grief, marriage, and the birth of a play that’s been analyzed to death for four centuries. Hamnet arrived with near-impossible demand, required last-minute screenings to accommodate overflow crowds, and ultimately took home the People’s Choice Award. All that for a film about Shakespeare’s dead son. Chloé Zhao clearly knew what she was doing.

The Oscar-winning director of Nomadland returns to the intimate, spiritually attuned filmmaking that defined her early work, leaving her Eternals detour firmly in the rearview. Co-writing with novelist Maggie O’Farrell, who adapts her own acclaimed 2020 book — a bestseller that won both the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award — Zhao crafts a mostly fictional account of the marriage between Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter) and William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal, Gladiator II).

Agnes is a forest-dwelling enigma who prefers the woods and open air to indoor stuffiness; he’s a tutor she crosses paths with, eventually marrying and encouraging him to forget about ordinary life as a farmer and instead pursue his writing. As William builds a career in London, Agnes tends to their children in Stratford — including little Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe, Peter Pan & Wendy), whose sweet soul lights up everyone around him. When the family suffers through the unthinkable tragedy of his death, his name becomes the title of Shakespeare’s most enduring work, keeping his memory alive forever.

Buckley has been slightly hit or miss lately — I’m still smarting from her lack of a nomination for her breakout in Wild Rose — but here she’s perfectly on target. Bringing the audience along through excruciating moments of physical and emotional pain, Buckley never plays a false note. You wonder how she recovered between takes, and that’s only long after the film is over, once you remember she’s Jessie Buckley and not Agnes Hathaway. Mescal matches her beautifully, playing Shakespeare as a man torn between providing for his family and pursuing the work his wife insists matters. He’s an actor of such emotional maturity that he knows exactly when to pause and when to break silence for maximum impact.

As William’s mother, Emily Watson (Small Things Like These), who might have played Buckley’s role fifteen years ago and done a damn fine job, understands this tough-as-nails matriarch and digs her heels into it with fervor. Both Jacobi Jupe and his older brother Noah (Suburbicon) appear here — Jacobi carrying the weight of the film’s emotional center with a naturalness that never feels coached, Noah, continuing to prove he’s made it over the hurdle from precocious child star to compelling young adult. Only the frustrated rage of David Wilmot (Little Joe) as John Shakespeare can sometimes read as overplayed, treading into the familiar trap of a father wanting his artistic son to come out of the clouds.

Twice Oscar-nominated cinematographer Łukasz Żal (The Zone of Interest, Ida) shoots Herefordshire like a character with its own pulse — mist clinging to branches, light filtering through canopy, the damp earth that Agnes seems to draw strength from. Production designer Fiona Crombie builds interiors that feel lived-in and scarred, the Shakespeare home bearing subtle evidence of John’s violence in a cracked windowpane here, a broken spindle there.

Malgosia Turzanska’s (Train Dreams) costumes start simple but grow grander as we move from real-world tragedy to theatrical catharsis — Agnes in earthy reds that fade to bruised purples after Hamnet’s death, the stage costumes of Hamlet glittering like something pulled from grief and gilded. Max Richter‘s score, including his haunting “On the Nature of Daylight,” provides the emotional architecture that lets you surrender completely to the tears that have been welling.

My screening was a bit of a battle — a last-minute addition to meet demand, a seat assignment that had been given away by the time I arrived, and a second-row perch that put me close enough to count eyelashes but too close to take in the full scope of Zhao’s compositions. I look forward to revisiting Hamnet under ideal conditions — this is the kind of sensitive, exquisitely crafted work that deserves undivided attention. Judging by the sniffles and streaked mascara around me at the credits, most of the audience had no trouble letting go. They reached for the stage, just like Agnes does, hoping to touch something that’s already gone but refusing to believe it.