A Major New Oscar Contender Has Arrived. It Is Once Again About … Putting on Hamlet .

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For the second year in a row, the Toronto International Film Festival’s audience prize might go to a movie about putting on Hamlet .

Last year, of course, the People’s Choice Award—a reliable, if not infallible, bellwether of a Best Picture nomination—was Hamnet , which doubled down on Shakespeare’s greatest fictional tragedy by fusing it with the real-life death of his 11-year-old son . This year, the movie that had TIFF-goers sniffling in their seats is Elsinore , starring Andrew Scott as actor Ian Charleson, who took the lead in a National Theatre production of Hamlet mere weeks before he died of AIDS-related complications.

Building a tragedy around Hamlet is arguably the dramatic equivalent of starting on third base, but Elsinore doesn’t simply pop in a few lines of Shakespeare when it runs short on poetry. While Hamnet thrives on the parallels between the play and the grief that, at least in theory, inspired it , Elsinore drives at an unstated irony: Hamlet is about a man who wants to die, and the movie is about a man who is determined to live.

Although Charleson played one of the leads in the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire and a supporting role in Gandhi , which won Best Picture the following year, he never quite became a movie star, and by 1989, when Elsinore picks up the story, he’s openly envious of the meteoric rise of Daniel Day-Lewis, whose forthcoming Hamlet is already the talk of the town. But when Day-Lewis abruptly walks offstage in the middle of the performance—as legend has it, because he saw the ghost of his own father onstage —there’s a sudden opening, and director Richard Eyre (Johnny Flynn) wants Ian to fill the part. Ian, however, has just discovered his first Kaposi’s sarcoma, and his doctor (Olivia Colman) suggests it would be wiser to put all his energies into fighting the disease rather than taking on a four-hour play that climaxes with a swordfight. He can play the role of a lifetime, or he can prolong his own life. And as he tells her, “I’d rather die of Hamlet than AIDS.”

The movie, directed by Simon Stone and written by Stephen Beresford, touches on Hamlet ’s greatest hits: There’s Yorick, the nunnery, and eventually some “To be or not to be.” But it also circles back again and again to a line that doesn’t usually get as much attention: “Remember me.” Originally spoken by the ghost of Hamlet’s father and repeated by his son, it becomes Elsinore ’s refrain, not just for Charleson but for the era he represents, when even the most enlightened clinics still burned the bedding after a patient died of AIDS and coming out of the closet could be a career-killer. Charleson, whose sexual orientation was not made public until after his death, is heavily criticized by the pioneering gay director Derek Jarman (David Dawson) for putting his Hollywood aspirations above the fate of his community.