Grief for the loss of a child is one of the strongest of human emotions, yet it’s rarely explored by Hollywood.

A brave, new film called Rabbit Hole, starring Nicole Kidman in a multi-award nominated performance, is set to rectify that.

“It’s the place you most fear to tread,” says Kidman, aged 43.

“Particularly as a parent, a mother, it’s the most terrifying place to go and exist but at the same time it’s the most important.

“Life can be very beautiful, but there’s the other end of the spectrum when it can be so painful. I wanted to honour that for people. It’s not explored that often and for me it needs to be.”

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire, Rabbit Hole is set in suburban America and tells the story of Becca and Howie Corbett (Aaron Eckhart), a married couple struggling to return to their everyday existence several months after the death of their six-year-old boy.

Thankfully devoid of sentimentality, the film examines the way people really cope with tragedy - awkwardly, stubbornly and in fits and starts.

“A lot of times grief is dealt with a week after the loss, this is eight months and it’s about, ‘How do you live each day?”’ says Kidman, mother to four children: Isabella, 18, and Connor, 16, who she adopted with ex-husband Tom Cruise, her daughter Sunday, 2, with husband, country singer Keith Urban and their latest addition, Faith Margaret born via a surrogate on December 28 last year.

“It’s not the broad strokes, it’s the minute strokes of choosing to live each day,” she adds.

“How do you live together as a couple having had the most traumatic loss you’ll ever have? How do you still walk through each day and each hour? That’s what I love about the screenplay.”

The Australian actress was sitting in a coffee shop in Nashville where she now lives (“It’s a quiet life there, which I relish”) when she first heard of Rabbit Hole.