The novel “Hamnet” is a piece of historic fiction centered on Agnes, a supposed “healer” with a firmer grasp on crops than individuals. As a younger lady within the Sixteenth-century, Agnes falls in love with a playwright who isn’t named however is clearly meant to be William Shakespeare — or, reasonably, this universe’s model of The Bard. The story shifts backwards and forwards in time from the early days of the pair’s passionate courtship to fifteen years later, when tragedy befalls their 11-year-old son Hamnet. This occasion will encourage the boy’s father to concoct a play titled, effectively, you-know-what, leaving Agnes to grieve in her personal style.

Shakespeare’s real-life son Hamnet was additionally the topic of Kenneth Branagh’s “All Is True,” a largely fictional film through which the newly-retired Bard (Branagh) makes an attempt to rekindle ties along with his daughters and spouse, Anne Hathaway (sure, that is her precise title). Whereas that movie sees Shakespeare taking inventory of his life and confronting the — at occasions literal — ghosts of his previous, “Hamnet” is, as NPR’s evaluation of the e-book places it, “a love story a couple of sorely examined marriage.” Between its tumultuous romance and Malickian themes of spirituality and nature, one can see why Chloé Zhao was drawn to the fabric.