Here is a fascinating contradiction: a film I recognize to be well made, beautifully shot, and terrifically acted that I did not connect with at all.

By the end, when the lights came up in the theater, I was surrounded by a sobbing audience. The person next to me dabbed their red, puffy eyes. Others hugged. Colleagues in the lobby were breathless. This was the film the festival could not stop talking about.

Initially, I feared my reaction to the film was some contrarian impulse. A lizard brain artifact from youth that now, in my mid-thirties, decided to make an unwelcome return. But after some days of sleeping on the matter, I don't believe that to be the case. I admire many aspects of Hamnet, just as I intensely dislike others. I can see why it resonates with so many, and why, I believe, it will find a surge of negativity in the years to come. Especially if, as it is expected, it will win big at the Oscars.

This is a fictional film about William Shakespeare, a historical figure so wrapped in mystery and obfuscation that any "true" account of his past seems foolhardy. Instead, and quite smartly, Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell (who wrote the source novel) focus on a singular part of his life – and even that plays fast and loose with the little that we know.

Will (Paul Mescal) meets Agnes (Jessie Buckley), and the two fall in love. They're distant but kindred souls, one of the city and the other of nature. Bound by the rejection of society that doesn't understand them, they wed, move in together, and start a family. Will struggles to adjust to a normal life and heads for London, where his theater troupe finds success. He visits often, though he becomes a guest in his own family's life. Agnes, supportive even at the cost of her own happiness, raises their children, until a devastating illness takes their son, Hamnet.

Suddenly, nothing is the same. There is a void the shape and size of a small child in their life, and it cannot heal.

This is a film, like Sentimental Value earlier in the year, that explores the healing power of art and its ability to help us convey the emotions we are unable to vocalize ourselves. In one triumphant scene, it comes close to delivering on that promise. It is the moment Agnes finally witnesses what Will has worked on in his solitude. This isn't a spoiler, the conclusion is the title of the film.

But to get there, Hamnet makes choices that I couldn't connect with. Some of them I found to be downright tacky.

For example, from the outset, we know this is the story about the loss of a child. It is that inevitability that lends an ominous terror to the first half of the film. Whatever happiness comes, it will swiftly be taken away. Zhao knows this, and she milks it to a degree that, at times, borderlines on parody.

When Hamnet and his twin sister are born, there is momentary doubt that one of them is stillborn. We stay with Agnes and her babe, which isn't breathing, for a long, long time. Then, it coughs, gasps, and lives. It feels like a disingenuous moment, especially as Zhao repeats it a mere half hour later with different results.

Every scene with Hamnet, whether it's practicing a sword fight with his father or declaring to Agnes that he will one day be on the stage too, feels gratuitious. Like a buildup to a disaster. Everything exists in a vacuum of death and we, as an audience, take part in that show because ostensibly we've bought a ticket to watch a child die and the family to find the courage to move on. By the time the heartbreak happens, we're well over halfway into the picture.

Then, as Will begins his work, the picture hits every sentimental beat you would expect from a less assured filmmaker than Zhao. That sword fight Hamnet and Will practiced? Naturally it is the climactic battle from Hamlet. A random sentence uttered years earlier becomes a famous line. Even "to be or not to be" sneaks its way in, as if to suggest that Hamlet, the play, could only exist if cobbled together from grief and fading memories of a dead child.

Hamnet is a beautifully staged picture, make no mistake. Buckley and Mescal act out grief with all their hearts. Buckley, in particular, is remarkable, elevating even the worst aspects of the material into something humane and true. They're often let down by a script that requires them to sit in empty rooms and sob. But watch how the film comes to life when they come together to wade against the torrents of grief.

But if you do not accept how the film gets there, chances are you won't connect with Hamnet at all. If, at any point, you ask why does the film frame Hamnet with an expecting eye, as if to make the audience ask "does it happen now?", chances are you'll find the end result as distasteful as I did.

Perhaps you'll just marvel at the sense of time and place, which Zhao constructs out of small moments gracefully and without a fuss. Maybe you'll be lost in the final bit of catharsis, where play and reality merge in a way that is undeniably beautiful. Sometimes that's enough for a connection.

For me, it wasn't.