Hamnet (12A, 125 mins) 

Verdict: Intoxicating tearjerker

Rating:

As an unknown teenager from County Kerry, Jessie Buckley was runner-up in the 2008 BBC talent show I'd Do Anything, competing to play Nancy in a West End production of Oliver!.

Eighteen years on from that near-miss, she keeps showing us that she can do anything. On Sunday, she was anointed best actress in the Critics Choice Awards for her mesmerising performance in Chloe Zhao's Hamnet, which shortened the odds on her adding an Academy Award on March 15.

I predicted it when I first saw Hamnet at the London Film Festival in October. An Oscar would be richly deserved.

Buckley plays Agnes Shakespeare, better known to posterity as Anne Hathaway. 

However she is styled (she was named in her father's will as Agnes), she has only a supporting role in the history books. But she is the dominant figure in Zhao's deeply soulful, altogether intoxicating tearjerker, adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's acclaimed 2020 novel of the same name.

Paul Mescal is wonderful too, as William. But Buckley's performance is a proper tour de force. As it happens, she stayed right next door to us while they were shooting Hamnet near our Herefordshire home, and little did we know how much she must have needed to recharge her batteries every night. It's hard to unleash so much visceral emotion without over-acting. She does so triumphantly and, though she is the one getting the plaudits, Mescal matches her.

When we meet Agnes (pronounced in the French way, with a silent 'g'), she seems almost umbilically connected to the woodland surrounding her village. As she comes and goes with a hawk on her arm, she catches the eye of a young man who is tutoring boys to pay off the debts of his father (David Wilmot).

Although the name is mentioned only once during the entire film, this is William Shakespeare. He woos her, and after Agnes becomes pregnant, the pair get married.

Her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) questions the sense of marrying 'a pasty-faced scholar', but they are very much in love. Their first-born, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), is followed by twins, Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe).

William is an engaged, doting father, especially with Hamnet. There's a touching scene in which father and son say goodbye – because, to fulfil his ambitions as a writer, William must leave his family behind. 'He needs to go to London,' says Agnes. 'London is where the whole world gathers.'

But while he is making his name in the city, Judith falls ill with the bubonic plague. She recovers, but then Hamnet succumbs, aged 11, and from here the film becomes a study of intense grief.

We are perhaps inclined to think these days that the loss of a child in times of plague, as in countries blighted by war or famine now, can't be quite as harrowing as it might be for us in our (relatively) untroubled modern-day Western world. Zhao's film and the performances of her leads give the lie to that.

For William, the creation of his tragedy Hamlet is a way of working through his misery. His stricken wife has no such outlet, but the final part of the film takes us to the Globe theatre and the inaugural performance of Hamlet, with Agnes in the audience. It is an extraordinarily powerful few minutes of cinema.

The virtues of Hamnet extend far beyond the artistry of its director (also the co-writer, with O'Farrell herself) and the acting of Buckley and Mescal. The younger cast members are all terrific, especially Jacobi Jupe in the title role. Polish cinematographer Lukasz Zal has excelled himself, too. Almost every interior shot looks like a Rembrandt painting.

As for Zhao, already a best director Oscar-winner for Nomadland (2020), she was introduced at the London premiere in October by one of the film's producers, a fellow of some renown named Spielberg. Duly empowered, she then exhorted the entire audience at the Royal Festival Hall to join her in a prolonged breathing exercise. It was more than a little weird but gave some insight into how much of herself Zhao put into this beautiful film.

After all, as Polonius says to Laertes in a certain play: 'To thine own self be true'.

A first-look review of Hamnet ran in October. The film is in cinemas now.