If I had to condense my taste in film to one mantra it would be this – there is a distinction between seriousness and profundity. Just because a film is unremittingly, endlessly, insistently serious does not mean that it is profound. Likewise, the most profound texts are often able to encompass a wide variety of tones, including comedy, since this diversity is part of the human experience. Nowhere is that distinction clearer, and nowhere is a certain contemporary tendency towards empty seriousness clearer, than in Hamnet, Chloe Zhao’s leaden adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel, which traces the death of William Shakespeare’s (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Hathaway’s (Jessie Buckley) son Hamnet to the inspiration for the Bard’s most iconic play. Part of the reason the gulf between seriousness and profundity is so clear in this instance is that Shakespeare’s own plays resist the conflation of the two, perhaps more than any other writer in the English language. Even Shakespeare’s most tragic and trauma-laden ventures contain interludes of comedy, bathos, sensationalism, curiosity, ribaldry, melancholy and all the other tonalities in his cosmic palette – and Hamlet more than any of them. By contrast, Zhao and O’Farrell’s screenplay utterly flatten this diversity, trauma-mining Hamlet in the name of prestige grief cinema.

What ensues plays like Booker Prize aesthetics at their worst, a collection of signifiers of “high art” that never become more than the sum of their parts. In this kind of text, unremitting grief is nearly always the fallback or default mode, since it legitimates an incessant seriousness that would be insufferable in any other kind of narrative. At heart, the Booker Prize aesthetic involves reducing the travails of humanity to a nuclear family drama (usually centred on the Upper West Side, or some analogous space), which is precisely what occurs here. The Shakespeare of Hamnet is first and foremost a family man, with no hints of his bisexuality, his affairs, or his urban life, as all of his strangeness and alterity is deflected into Agnes’ banal “witchiness.” Similarly, there is no hint of the vast cosmos of relationships that populate Shakespeare’s theatrical universe – lovers, siblings, monarchs and their subjects, conspirators and traitors, political enemies, and all his interfaces between the natural and supernatural worlds. Instead, seriousness amounts to a self-serious reduction of everything in Shakespeare’s universe to the kinds of agonised nuclear families that predominate in contemporary literature, where they often reflect a Boomer sensibility that is out of touch with our more precarious world – a precarity, ironically, that lends itself to Shakespeare’s own voluminous sense of change and mutability. For all that Hamnet might open with a quote from Stephen Greenblatt in defence of its central thesis, Mescal’s Shakespeare is utterly dissociated from what new historicists might describe as the “energies” of his age, hermetically isolated as subject-matter for modern book clubs.

Everything in this film is grief. The first act is pre-grief, as Zhao and O’Farrell saturate their screenplay with trauma even before the death of Hamnet occurs. Shakespeare is traumatised by his father, by his writer’s block; Agnes is traumatised by breaking with her wealthy family and by not being permitted to visit her beloved forest during a dangerous flood. The sheer presence of Emily Watson in the guise of Mary Shakespeare offers a brief respite from this tonal monotony, but she’s quickly eclipsed in the second act, which details the death of eleven-year-old Hamnet from bubonic plague. No doubt, this scene is well acted and well directed, but it’s so insistent in its traumatic “significance” that it brings to mind Oscar Wilde’s riposte to the endlessly sentimental Nell of Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” The third act, which takes place in London, is exactly the same; there’s no sense of the Globe Theatre as a vibrant artistic community, as occurs in Shakespeare in Love (for all its detractors, a much truer film to the spirit of the Bard), but simply a site for processing trauma, an endless trauma dump that culminates with an unimaginably cheesy scene in which Shakespeare recites “To be or not to be” while standing at the edge of the Thames.

Throughout all three acts, I just didn’t find it believable that Mescal’s Shakespeare was the man who infused his theatre with such vitality. I didn’t really believe in the world of the film either – it’s the complete opposite of, say, Hilary Mantel’s version of the English Renaissance, her vision of English history as both radically other in its terrifying precarity and strangely sympathetic from the present day. On top of all this, there’s surprisingly little on how Shakespeare translated his trauma into Hamlet; his working process is elided, taking place while he’s sequestered in London, out of contact with his family. It makes you wonder whether the connection between Hamnet and Hamlet, the whole raison d’etre of the film, is a bit tenuous, and that makes you wonder, in turn, why this is even about Shakespeare, except as a nice bit of cultural capital to be trauma-mined for “serious” prestige grief. The connection occurs in the closing scene of the film, when Agnes attends the Globe premiere of Hamlet, but even these links are pretty basic – the father-son relationship, the general focus on grief, Shakespeare’s perennial interest in mortality and mutability. The cheesiness of the film climaxes with Shakespeare himself playing the ghost – whether or not it actually happened, the scene itself is awful in the way it reduces Hamlet to a one-note grief text.

Since Zhao is an excellent director there are a few lyrical moments here and there, especially when Agnes is alone in her beloved forest. Here, Zhao relies mainly on ambient noise – wind in the trees, the babbling of the brook, the flap of falcons’ wings – as they coalesce around an enormous tree that allows her to commune with what Northrop Frye described as the “green world.” Yet this green world was also the site of a cosmic comedy that is utterly missing from the film, much as this dreamlike atmosphere quickly turns soporific once the leaden trauma of it all kicks in. In the end, Hamnet belongs with a wave of harrowing motherhood films that include If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Die My Love but in place of their aesthetic originality and narrative daring falls back upon Shakespeare in the blandest, most cynical and reductive way, making a case for “seriousness” above all else.