Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal in Chloé Zhao’s drama

The first time we see Agnes (Jessie Buckley), he snuggles asleep in the base covered with a giant tree. Dressed in red and purple, it looks like a flower, or perhaps an organ, a heart outdoors, ready to be torn and kept close. Next to it is a vacuum, a hole under the roots so deep and so dark that it doesn’t seem at all.

In HamnetThe last Oscar winner movie Nomadic The director Chloé Zhao, the two always go hand in hand: joy and fear, love and loss. One feeds on the other in a cycle as old as life itself and inevitable. But just when his William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) turns the pain of being caught between the two of the masterpiece that is VillageZhao takes advantage of those elements in something beautiful and cathartic.

The first time Will see Agnes, she will return from that same stay in the forest. He is supposedly tutoring his brothers in Latin, but is distracted by her vision from his window. He follows her to the barn and asks for his name. She refuses timidly and lets her kiss her before she finally responds. So undeniable is his attraction that they are who they are for the rest of the world just seems to matter.

In a very short time, the two sneak in the forest and find themselves in sheds, putting a whirlwind romance that know very well no family would approve it. Will Mary’s mother (Emily Watson) has heard Rumors of Agnes is the daughter of a forest witch. Agnes’s brother, Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), although more open -minded mind, asks why “a scholar with a pasty face” would be binded. But their opinions stop importing once it is pregnant, leaving future parents without remedy to marry and start a family that will eventually include three charming children.

The first act of HamnetThat Zhao wrote with Maggie O’Farrell based on O’Farrell’s own novel, is a thing of delight and astonishment. Zhao’s appreciation for natural greatness, as seen even in his large -budget superhero film EternalIt shines, just like your attention to detail. The director of photography Lukasz Zal captures the vast exuberance of the forest where Agnes and first will fall in love with generous wide shots that occasionally make the couple look like forest creatures, and sound designer Johnnie Burn evokes the quiet rhythms of everyday life with occasional musical assistance of Max Richter’s ethereal score.

There is something almost primary about Agnes in particular, which is a creature of nature that when his water breaks with his first child, he slides to the forest to give birth alone. (Mary is forced to have her second birth inside, who does not unfairly point out that she is raining absolutely).

But the needs of civilized society have a way of interfering. Agnes could have happy to wander those hills forever, but Will is a frustrated artist who can even see that he must be among other creatives in London. She encourages him to pursue her dreams, but as Will’s career takes off in the city, she becomes more and more reluctant to leave Stratford-Upon-Avon. Even so, his family life is still happy when he is at home: his only son, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), is particularly close to his father, dreaming of working with him at the theater one day.

But it is while it is out of that unthinkable tragedy, it happens, destroying forever the idyll of the Shakespeare clan and driving a seemingly intractable wedge between Agnes and Will. She retires, unable to move on and bitter because he was not there when he needed it most. It seems that he cannot move forward quickly, returning to London while the pain is still fresh and throws more and more of himself to his work.

Mescal is wonderful like the bard, in a role that could cause even more tears than its mourning musicologist in The Sound History. He minimizes his emotions when one might expect to go in a big way, which makes the moments in which he explodes even more shocking. Among the cast of support, Watson deserves a special mention for a devastating monologue halfway, in which he summarizes one of the central theses of the film by simply stating that “what is given can be removed at any time.”

But it is Buckley who really stuns, while evolving Agnes from the girl with a free spirit to the beloved wife and mother to the brittle and afflicted woman. She lands a character who could have seemed too ethereal in raw and naked feeling; There is a time when he shouts with pain until he runs out of sound that I will think for a long time.

Buckley is an actor who can take you on a complete trip because of the way she Watches someone. She does it at the beginning of the film, when Will tells her the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (another about a love couple and a greedy emptiness). And he does it even more powerfully in the third act, since he finally sees what Will has been doing in his months away.

Initially, she is confused and distressed when she discovered that her husband has appointed her new tragedy after her son. (As notes at the beginning of the film, “Hamlet” and “Hamnet” were considered the same name at that time). However, she begins to see how Will has expressed her pain through her game, and doing so transformed a meaningless tragedy into a significant masterpiece that could move hundreds, billions.

How precisely does this, Hamnet It is not shown in detail, since Zhao only plays looking at his creative process. It adapts very well to the movie. The glory and terror of the elements are presented to us in those first shots of Agnes in the forest, they transform, as by magic, into the durable power of art.