William Shakespeare sure loved a doomed heroine. Some of the Bard’s most famous women — Juliet, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth — all met with a grisly fate, but few are as iconic as Hamlet’s Ophelia, who goes mad with heartbreak and drowns herself in a river. While Hamlet’s insanity and demise have been explored countless times since the play’s publication in 1603, much of Ophelia’s story happens off stage. Claire McCarthy’s new film Ophelia, led by Star Wars’ Daisy Ridley, aims to change that — and reimagine the character as a bold, complicated young heroine.

It’s a radical reinvention for a woman who’s most frequently portrayed in art and literature as a docile, waif-like beauty, driven mad by love and passively accepting her watery death.

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