In 2020, Maggie O’Farrell’s historical fiction novel Hamnet devastated readers with its fictionalized account of the death of William Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet. More specifically, the novel focuses on Hamnet’s mother, Agnes. It is a quiet, profound account of a woman’s grief in the wake of unspeakable loss, and who better to helm the newly released film adaptation than Chloé Zhao?

It would be so easy for a director to put all the emotional weight of this story into the big dramatic moments — I mean, the concluding scene is literally a production of Hamlet. But what Zhao understands is that this story is about the moments in between. The before being just as important as the after. It’s a story not just about the fallout of such a devastating loss, but about living in the fallout. We watch Agnes, portrayed masterfully by Jessie Buckley, live through every moment that led up to the death of her son, and all the ones that follow. Zhao understands what first made O’Farrell’s novel so successful, which is that the audience has to live with these characters and their pain. It’s a story that is so much about life even when at its center sits a tragic death.

The film is effectively structured in that the story is told less as a smooth, flowing narrative and more as a series of snapshots or vignettes recounting different moments in Agnes and William’s life. But although these individual moments may not be long, we as the audience still get to live in each of them, an effect achieved through a number of creative decisions: the score is sparce yet effective, Zhao opts for longer takes rather than frequent cuts, and silence is given just as much space as words.

The weight of William Shakespeare’s work is woven into the fabric of this film, but Zhao understands that to overuse direct quotations or allusions to Hamlet would do a disservice to this story. This is part of the genius of O’Farrell’s novel, too — the impact that Hamnet’s death has on Will is written into the story of Hamlet, but it’s not at all one-to-one. The choices of when, how, and which moments of Hamlet to directly reference are one of the most crucial elements to this story, and a tool that Zhao employs sparingly yet masterfully.

When adapting a novel for the screen, the question of what visual language is appropriate for telling a story that so far has only existed in words is crucial. Here, Zhao opts for vibrant colors and wide expanses, the visuals so lush and teeming with life in a way that, rather than polarizing the death and loss that sits at the center of this story, only goes to emphasize that all of these things exist in a single life. For there to be death there has to be life, and vice versa. Agnes’s childhood and the things she sees are so intertwined with the forest and the natural world just outside her door, and even within that beautiful space there exists the creation of new life as well as the losses of others.

The biggest changes from the novel are in the portrayal of William Shakespeare himself — played by Paul Mescal — whose time in London away from Agnes is expanded upon and featured prevalently in ways the novel does not directly touch on. While I adore how much the novel centers Agnes and her grief, I think the decision to expand on Will in the film is the correct one. As we cut back and forth between Agnes and Will in the aftermath of Hamnet’s death, we see the different ways grief has taken ahold of them, exacerbated by the fact that they are apart, while also not losing the isolation that Agnes feels with her husband being so far away. We see the stark differences between Will, who’d rather run back to London and bury himself in his work than stay in the place where his son last drew breath, and Agnes, who everyday walks in the empty spaces where Hamnet should be.

In this film, Zhao prioritizes character and the actors’ performances above all else, and that’s the key ingredient. It’s no coincidence that a Chloé Zhao film is in conversations to win acting awards again, with her 2020 film Nomadland earning Frances McDormand her third Academy Award (as well as winning Zhao the awards for Best Picture and Best Director). Paul Mescal is unbelievable in this movie and earns a spot on my list of “actors I could watch perform Shakespeare all day, every day.” But where he is outspoken, his emotions bubbling over and solidifying into words as soon as he feels them, Jessie Buckley’s Agnes is quieter, more turned inward, giving Buckley a tricky responsibility that she more than rises to. What’s most impressive is not her deliveries of her lines, but the way she plays the spaces in between as perhaps having more to say than her words. It’s the beautiful balance between these two performances and how we watch these characters feel that makes this movie seem like magic.

The supporting cast members of this film deserve their flowers, too. Emily Watson is devastating as Will’s mother, Mary, who has lived with so much pain for so long that you almost wouldn’t notice it anymore. Much like the two lead performances, she never overplays anything. Subtlety and attention to detail are the common factors among every performance in this film — from Joe Alwyn’s quiet yet sturdy presence as Agnes’s older brother, Bartholomew, to Jacobi Jupe’s star-making turn as little Hamnet himself. Perhaps the true standout, though, is Noah Jupe as Hamlet, who breathes new life and meaning into some of William Shakespeare’s most famous words that we’ve heard recited hundreds of times. I tip my hat to the casting of Jacobi Jupe’s older brother to play Hamlet, a decision that makes the final scene all the more devastating for their shared mannerisms and the subtle similarities in their appearances.

Just as the novel does, the film concludes with a performance of Hamlet at the Globe Theater. This is a moment that could so easily feel trite or even uninspired as a note to end on, but both the novel and the film earn it a hundred times over. Again, most everyone in the audience will be somewhat familiar with the play itself, or at the very least have heard these iconic monologues quoted or referenced in some capacity. It’s hard to make such famous words that have been performed countless times by an infinite number of actors feel like something new, or like something that is being discovered for the first time. As much as Jupe and Mescal get the credit for their performances on the stage, it’s Buckley who sells it in her wordless reactions, because Agnes is hearing these words for the first time. She has to run through every emotion while standing among the crowd watching this play, from anger to sadness and all the way around to something close to joy. And because we don’t have the benefit of internal monologue as we would in the book, it all has to play on Buckley’s face. We watch her relive the life and death of her son all over again in just a few moments, and the emotional release is an exhale at the end of a film that never lets itself gets trapped under the weight of its own story.