London Film Festival Shakespeare in grief will melt the hardest of hearts

When Maggie O'Farrell took on the personal life of William Shakespeare, it was a bestselling smash.

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Her book, Hamnet, imagined the interior world of Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway, here named Agnes, and their only son Hamnet, who died aged 11, about four years before Hamlet debuted at the Globe theatre. It's a tricky work to adapt for the big screen, with O'Farrell's novel flitting between time periods, intimately honing in on witchy forest woman Agnes and her folk magic powers, with the great man only alluded to, yet never named.

Understandably for a work that is mostly inner monologue, Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) has had to make some changes, but has stayed impressively true to the spirit and the emotional punch of her source material. Hamnet is an immersive portrait of love and loss that resists tipping into the maudlin.